Top Reads

Tomorrow is the start of the “Quicker Drupal adoption: The 10 minute challenge”. The original post brought a good amount of feedback, which I am summarizing and will post a follow-up in the coming days. I hope some of the comments/ideas get implemented. (read more)

I have received a few emails from a folks sharing their
views on topics. I guess it is time to introduce some new features on this site
that will allow commenting and social sharing of content.

Now when you visit a post you will be able to comment and reply to comments.
This is a pretty common feature on most high traffic sites. It is a great way
to include others in on my thoughts. One extra feature, when commenting you
will be notified if someone else replied to your comment or added another
comment. That is why your email will be asked. (read more)

I am working towards releasing a revenue sharing module back to the community. The module is based off a shopping comparison api, much like the Amazon module. This module will allow medium to large sites to leverage their traffic outside of advertising banners, Google Adsense etc. Unfortunately it will require Drupal 6 and PHP 5*. (read more)

Task: Recently a client asked for a simple yet flexible and scalable solution to modify the user profile output for a particular role (client is using the profile module). The client also wants to grant this role full html privileges with certain profile fields.

By default, the profile.module runs each... (read more)

Challenge

Spend 10 minutes 3 times a week for 4 weeks answering questions in Drupal.org forums. When? Starting July 1 (2008). What's that? "I don't know enough yet" OR "I'm too busy developing core". Don't make up your mind just yet. Read on...

Why?

If you could measure adoption rate throughout Drupal.org, my hunch is that the Forums create a faster adoption than Drupal Groups, Modules, Issues etc. The forums are lacking responses and that adoption rate is slowly declining (IMO). (read more)

Task: On a recent project a client asked for the following: when visiting a taxonomy term, if that term has children, to display a new block displaying the children terms. The block would also need to have the parent term as the title. (read more)

Every where you read on Drupal.org, Professional Drupal Development book, IRC ect, all of us who know Drupal intimately say "Not to hack core" files. I include core module files with that statement. Here are a couple of reasons why: (read more)

Thanks to Dmitri (and Bevan) who has contributed a new module (Vertical Tabs - Drupal 6 only currently) that minimizes vertical scrolling on node forms. (read more)

A client recently requested ffmpeg to be installed on the server. I have done this in the past on a client's box but he had a different OS setup. For that installation I used a HowTo guide from VexxHost. (read more)

A client recently asked for SugarCRM integration with Drupal. I just wanted to report on my findings. There are two SugarCRM + Drupal solutions... (read more)

Template Monster that is. Template monster has decided to offer Drupal templates.

I am glad to see this happen. I have said many times in the Drupal IRC channel that Drupal needs to get more CSS'ers involved. Or, get more freelancer themers involved, like those from Joomla and Wordpress. (read more)

As you get your hands dirty with Ubercart you will find little things you don't like. Some of the little things are important and others are not. If you stick with Ubercart long enough you will learn that with time, skill, and determination you can modify your Ubercart install as your wish - most of the time. (read more)

FYI: I was surprised Google.com was down for 2 whole minutes this morning. It wasn't my connection, as I tried other sites and all loaded without delay. I don't recall this happening to me in the past nor others mentioning it.

I did see though that Adsense adds were loading on the sites I checked while waiting for Google.com to respond. I assume adsense ads are served up from another server (Google has 24 servers, or more, just for search); so their whole network was not down (read more)

Congratulations to NewsWeek on a great usability web page. I stumbled on this article (http://www.newsweek.com/id/98022) this evening and was surprised to see a clean yet usable "main" content page. I say "main content" referring to the article (left column).

If you take a look to the right of the article text you will see a bluish-gray box with a few eye catchy icons and links: Type Size, Print, Email, RSS, Social Networks, Links to this article. A little bit of play for every type of Web user. Let's see why this is a good fit for a broad base of Web users. (read more)

Recently I stumbled upon the "modulator", a script that builds a .module, .install, and .info files for you on the fly, naming the files along with the functions as well.

The script is written in Perl, I know this is not the "Drupal" way, but it is darn easy to use. Normally you would need to build these files by hand or piece one together. There is also a "module" to build a module skeleton for you - module builder. I prefer the Modulator simply because it is faster.

The script also works a bit with SimpleTest (see below) too, a nice feature. (read more)