DrupalCamp London, now in it's 4th year, was held of the weekend of the 4th, 5th and 6th of March at The University of London campus in London. Myself and a few other developers from Manchester headed down for the weekend to attend. I wasn't able to attend the CXO day on the 4th, but we were all in attendance for the camp event.

When overriding theme functions in Drupal 7 you would normally copy the theme function into the template.php and alter it to suit your needs. This isn't always convenient though, especially if you are trying to abstract functionality into modules and not have code in your theme layer that is reliant on module code. If you add theme override functions to your module files then they won't do anything as Drupal isn't looking for them there and won't pick them up.

DNS records, as many of you will already know, are commonly used to translate a human readable address into an IP address. This means that instead of visiting a website by typing in it's IP address you can just type in the easy to remember DNS address. I won't talk too much about how DNS records work here, but if you want to know more then you can read the awesome and easy to understand how DNS works commic.

DrupalCamp Scotland 2015 consisted of a Friday training day, followed by a day of talks and sessions on the 6th and 7th November.

The training day was based around Drupal 8 and had us looking at installation, configuration, and development. In the morning we set up a couple of Docker containers (on a Digital Ocean box) to run Drupal 8 from and then looked at the Drupal command line tool when setting up the system. Once installed we looked at the system structure and how the configuration management system worked. In the afternoon we created modules and themes, also using the Drupal console to generate some of the code fragments. I think the use of Docker on a remote server was a good idea in getting everyone up and running on the system without having to rely on local LAMP stacks or whatever. The training day was really good and I was able to swap lots of ideas and techniques with the trainers and other attendees.

PHPNW is the 8th annual PHPNW Conference, and I think I'm lucky to be one of the few who have attended every year. This was something that Jeremy Coates mentioned out as we sat down the introductory session, but it was also good to see lots of new people attending the conference as well. It was a great conference with a great community feeling.

The keynote this year was by Meri Williams, who talked about Stealing People Lessons from Artificial Intelligence. Meri's career has been in both development and project management and she was able to use lessons learnt during her PhD thesis on artificial intelligence in order to think about how people respond to work. The concept sounds a little un-emotional at face value, but part of the principles of AI is making sure that all agents have their own goals. Meri was a funny and engaging speaker who talked about all kinds of interesting aspects of how people learn and grow.

Or, how you can render a Drupal page with an entirely different template.

I recently had a requirement where I needed to get Drupal to render a single page of HTML that was entirely separate from the normal page layout of a site. This was actually part of an API callback, but this got me involved in looking at how delivery callbacks work in Drupal 7. It isn't necessary to create a new theme just for the job of rendering a single page with some custom HTML, especially as Drupal has mechanisms to provide this built in.

The city of Sunderland played host to DrupalCamp North, which saw Drupal users and contributors travelling from all over the UK and Europe to attend. The event, which was held from 24th-26th July, was jointly led by the North East, North West and Yorkshire Drupal User Groups and consisted of a three day sprint, a business day, and a two day conference.

There are a few ways in which you can create complex node access systems. Modules like Taxonomy Access Control and Node Access will allow you to restrict node access in different ways, and work very well for setting up taxonomy or role based access control. There are a few edge cases where you need to restrict access to a node based on some arbitrary conditions like the age of the user or the contents of a field. This is where the build in Drupal access control mechanisms come into play.