This month's Denver meetup started out bleak, lacking food, drink, and one of our presenters. But we persevered and ended the night full of food, drink, and new Drupal knowledge. It was a lot like Oregon Trail. Without the dysentery.
After initial entreaties to join various awesomeness — including DrupalCon Denver, DrupalChix Colorado, and the DrupalCon Denver DrupalChix party — Joel Steidl turned his planned short demo of Display Suite into a more in-depth overview of all the wonderful things this module helps you do in Drupal.
The first Display Suite nicety is layouts on entity view modes. By default, Drupal gives a Full and Teaser view mode for nodes that puts all fields in a single column. Display Suite offers additional layout options of two column, three column, and more. Joel pointed out that it's key to select a layout before doing anything else in Display Suite, as it currently does not select a default layout for you. When a multi-column layout is selected, the standard drag-and-drop interface for managing field organization can be used to easily move fields into columns for display.
There's more! Display Suite also allows you to add new view modes. Just like with standard teasers, each content type can display different fields on the same view mode, and custom view modes can be selected as a Views row style option. Markup on individual fields can also be controlled directly in the "Manage Displays" interface along with everything else. This all gives site builders a ton of flexibility outputting content before touching the template system. You can even turn off titles on the standard page display directly from the UI.
But that's not all! Display Suite even allows you to add custom fields to entity displays, including arbitrary markup (with tokens), blocks (including Jason's new project for passing arguments to Views blocks), and more. After demonstrating how far you can go with Display Suite, Joel said "I don’t know why you’d ever want a search form in the middle of your content, but you can do that with Display Suite." Such flexibility can be a pitfall in the wrong hands, and the first question was what other pitfalls are involved in using Display Suite. The two primary issues brought up were exportability and performance. Specifically, many Display Suite configurations still don't export to Features and sometimes loading the full entity for a display is overkill. For those wanting to learn more about Display Suite, Joel pointed to the extensive documentation on Drupal.org.
After learning all about Display Suite, we moved into some general Q&A. A question about new users claiming ownership of their own profile nodes led into a discussion of how administrators can re-assign authors on nodes. On a question about moving from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, the common advice was to use the opportunity for a full site redesign. And finally, for social media links, many people liked AddThis.
After the full meetup, we headed to post-meetup socializing, where we overfilled the largest table at Interstate Kitchen and Bar. It was great to have so many new people. Next month's Denver Drupal meetup will be even larger, so we'll be holding it at the Colorado Convention Center. (There will be no meetup, due to DrupalCon.) We'll be back to abnormal in April.