Drupal : Squeeze Every Last Drop of your CMS

Beautiful Drupal sites

2010-03-03T04:36:00.000-08:00

Yes, Drupal sites can be functional AND beautiful. Even thou Drupal does miss pretty out-of-the-box templates (themes) nothing should stop skilled designer and front-end developer from making good looking websites.

It the blog 70 beautiful Drupal sites you will find the finest examples.

When implmenting new design I usually start with Zen Theme which is probably the ugliest of all but also the purest when it comes to xhtml/css base implementation. Modifying css files is usually enough to bring the website to required look.

Drupal vs. Joomla

2010-03-03T04:11:00.000-08:00

When convincing people to use Drupal I was very often challenged with the question: why not to use Joomla instead? Till now had some problems to give professional and objective answer, one because of my devotion to Drupal, two because of my lack of experience of Joomla.
Few days ago found this post:

Drupal vs. Joomla: a frank comparison from an IBM consultant

I think it's indeed quite honest comparison of both content management systems, should quickly answer question about main pros and cons.

Drupal Case Study: Lifetime Digital

2010-03-03T02:28:00.001-08:00

The Lifetime Digital case study highlights the proven scalability and performance of Drupal websites in a high traffic environment. By utilizing Akamai technology for caching of rich media and for anonymous users, Lifetime Digital's 6 Drupal sites have proven successful in supporting:

* 50 million page views per month
* 6.5 million site visitors per month
* 150,000 page views per hour
* load tests to levels of greater than 500,000 page views per hour

Download full Drupal Case Study: Lifetime Digital

NOTE: improvenemts in Drupal 7 care for even greater performance and scalablility!

White House website using Drupal

2010-03-03T02:25:00.000-08:00

Did you know that from November 2009 the official White House website www.whitehouse.gov is using Drupal? This initiative is part of big open source promotion campaign and project CONNECT (an open source software solution that supports health information exchange – both locally and at the national level).

Drupal seems to be a perfect match for President Barack Obama's push for an open and transparent government -- Drupal provides a great mix of traditional web content management features and social features that enable open communication and participation. This combination is what we refer to as social publishing and is why so many people use Drupal. Furthermore, I think Drupal is a great fit in terms of President Barack Obama's desire to reduce cost and to act quickly. Drupal's flexibility and modularity enables organizations to build sites quickly at lower cost than most other systems. In other words, Drupal is a great match for the U.S. government.

It’s a clear sign that governments realize that Open Source does not pose additional risks compared to proprietary software, and furthermore, that by moving away from proprietary software, they are not being locked into a particular technology, and that they can benefit from the innovation that is the result of thousands of developers collaborating on Drupal. It takes time to understand these things and to bring this change, so I congratulate the Obama administration for taking such an important leadership role in considering Open Source solutions.

Being one of the world's largest consumers of computer software, the U.S. government is not new to Drupal. Several agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education, and the General Service Administration have been using Drupal, for example. Drupal adoption is growing rapidly within the U.S. government. However, Whitehouse.gov switching to Drupal goes above and beyond any other Drupal installation within the U.S. government, and is a fantastic testament for Drupal and Open Source. It will raise awareness about Drupal across the U.S. government, and across all governments world-wide.

Upgrading

2010-02-10T04:16:00.000-08:00

Upgrading Drupal can be pretty complex and frustrating. You can follow the official Drupal tutorials or choose for automated approach. The presentation guides you through upgrading to another major version (so for example from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6) in the automated way. It uses version control system and drush (command line shell and Unix scripting interface for Drupal).

The main tips are:

Make backups, often (of the Drupal files and DB)
Make frequent updates (keep modules and Drupal versions up to date)
Order matters! (some modules have dependencies so it’s important to install the modules in right order)
Disable contact with web (especially out coming e-mails, but also registration and user content generation)
Clean up (remove not used modules and files)

Slides: happypixels.net/blog/upgrading-drupal

Apache Solr and state-of-the-art search techniques

2010-02-10T03:48:00.000-08:00

Drupal's file handling capabilities keep getting better. Beyond the core upload module, the filefield module for CCK has enabled us to build sites with all sorts of files; documents, images, music, videos, and so forth. Searching within these docuements, however, has never been a common feature on Drupal sites. Some solutions have existed, particularly for extracting texts from PDFs and common wordprocessing documents. With Apache Solr, the attachments module, and an extension library called Tika, things can be much better. With Tika you can extract texts not only from Microsoft Office, Open Office, and PDF documents, you can also get text and metadata from images, songs, Flash movies and zipped archives. Searching for these texts is done as part of the normal Apache Solr driven site search.

Read more at: acquia.com/blog/use-apache-solr-search-files
Acquia Search: acquia.com/products-services/acquia-search
Slides: State-of-the-art Drupal search with Apache Solr

How to setup the perfect development environment (on Ubuntu)

2010-02-10T02:43:00.000-08:00

Setting up a new machine to be able to do Drupal development often takes a lot of time, googling and tweaking. The presentation goes about the automated installation process which takes you up to speed in roughly 20 minutes.
The whole installation process is split up in three different steps.

Setup Lamp Server
Setup Drush (command line shell and Unix scripting interface for Drupal)
Setup Eclipse (editing tool)

These steps have been automated based on a freshly installed Ubuntu 9.04. The article below gives you the code and the installation steps.

Article : Towards perfect drupal development environment
Slides PDF : krimson.be/sites/default/files/Roel_Dev_Machine.pdf
Slideshare : www.slideshare.net/krimsonbelgium

Front end performance

2010-02-10T02:08:00.000-08:00

Page load performance talk was presented on FOSDEM 2010 in Drupal devroom. Below you will find the main functionality and links with more information.

Page load performance is crucial for and successful website. It’s influenced in 10% by HTML, and in 90% by css, js and images. The solution presented in the talk would be use of content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) which is a system of computers containing copies of data, placed at various points in a network so as to maximize bandwidth for access to the data from clients throughout the network. A client accesses a copy of the data near to the client, as opposed to all clients accessing the same central server, so as to avoid bottleneck near that server. Use of CDN is particularly important for websites with huge graphical content and with target users spread across the globe.

The speaker presented his research on influence of CDN on performance of the website and modules which enable use of CDN within Drupal.

Slides: wimleers.com/talk/fosdem-2010
CDN module: drupal.org/project/cdn
Episodes module: drupal.org/project/episodes

The eID module

2010-02-10T02:00:00.000-08:00

The eid module was presented on FOSDEM 2010 as one of the Drupal devroom talks. Below you will find the main functionality and links with more information.

The eid module makes it possible to add Belgium eID Authentication to Drupal site. It works with a reverse proxy authentication.

Belgium eID can be compared to Dutch DigID but it uses hardware in form of card with chip and card reader. It’s used for e-counetr, electronical identification, digital signature. Belgian governance works hard to include eID in more online and offline activities.

I looked around but I was not able to find this kind of module for DigID. At FOSDEM I had a talk with developers of eID module and they would be interested to look at the technology behind DigID and consider building relevant module for Dutch users. Very handy for future projects in public sector.

Project page: drupal.org/project/eid
eID page: welcome-to-e-belgium.be

Display Suite module

2010-02-10T01:41:00.000-08:00

The Display Suite module was presented on FOSDEM 2010 as one of the Drupal devroom talks. Below you will find the main functionality and links with more information.

The Display suite module is an API which other modules can use to store and manipulate display data for objects (nodes, users, comments etc). Modules implementing this API automatically get an interface for adding build modes, fields and plugins either through code or via the UI.

Key features of the API:

Regions: every field can be dropped in its own region per build mode.
Choose formatters and labels per build mode
Define custom build modes via the UI.
Define custom (block) fields via the UI with token support.
Hooks for adding and overriding custom fields, plugins and build modes.
Plugins to alter the display at runtime.
Import & export functionality.
Views and basic Features support

Modules implementing the API:

Node displays- Node displays is a replacement for the node build modes and the field / display settings screen provided by CCK. You can select per build mode which field is displayed, give it an order and render it in a node region. Support and integration with core (search) and contrib (like CCK, fivestar and ubercart) modules is available at the Node displays contributions project.
Node displays contributions – support for CCK, Fivestars, Ubercart products, apachesolr.
Comment displays - renders the comment fields into regions.
User displays - renders the user profile fields (with or without the core profile module) into regions. It also exposes a block build mode so you can render different data of a user into a block region.
Heartbeat displays - shows user activity on a website

Project page: drupal.org/project/ds
Demo page: demo.customsource.be/ (You can login with demo/demo to play around)
Screen cast: www.vimeo.com/9214091

Drag and drop widgets page for Drupal 6

2010-02-02T04:11:00.000-08:00

For one of the projects had to find Drupal 6 module which gives you the functionality similar to iGoogle or Netvibes, where each authenticated user can design his/her own homepage (within your page) filled with portlets or widgets of his/her own choice.

It seemed like very cool functionality. I was sure the productive and innovative Drupal community came up with out-of-the-box module which does exactly that. The first link I found was this post with an example of frontend which looks pretty nice with drag drop functionality. The author even includes download, but unfortunately it’s only compatible with Drupal 4…

Then I found MySite module which has very promising functionality including not only Drupal based widget content but also Google Gadgets. The project site states however that MySite module works only with Drupal 5 and in Drupal 6, this module is being replaced by the Dashboard project. On the website of Dashboard project however the first thing you read is “Dashboard is being developed for Drupal.org as prototyped. It will work for all sites, but not yet.” Dead end.

But my huge believe in Drupal community didn’t let me to give up so easily… And then I found Home Box and it's long list of features:

Create as many home box pages that you need
Each home box pages as its own access permissions by role (ex: authenticated user, contributors, webmasters, etc.)
Users can enable/disable each block
Users can collapse each block
Each user action is saved in the background through Ajax (user doesn't even see it happen)
Users can set color for each block (colors are defined per home box pages)
Can be used with Color picker module to set block colors
Plays nicely with Views 2 and its exposed Ajax filters
Views 2 exposed filters are saved (even if user logs out and come back later)
Tested on Safari, Firefox, Chrome, IE 6, IE 7
Integrates with Path module so you can choose any URL alias for each home box page
Respects Drupal permissions' system (block restricted to certain roles aren't rendered for others)
Based on Drupal Block system, so anything that is a block can be used on such a page
Code is pretty clean and respects Drupal coding standards (checked with Coder module)
Comes with documentation through the excellent Advanced help module

Very easy to install and use without much need of tutorials. The fact it uses only block content and no external widgets doesn't really bother me that much. With all the freedom of building customized blocks you have quite a lot extra functionality.

Still taking my time to go deeper in it’s actual functionality, but from what I saw till now, it looks like module with lot’s of potential.

Why Drupal?

2009-10-07T11:14:00.000-07:00

Content management, blogs, and online communities are one the most significant online trends today, all gathered under even more hip name: web 2.0.
Extensive online content and knowlegde sharing together with world wide cooperation gave life to many open source projects.
I'm working in online environment already few years, specializing in CMS (Content Management System) and being huge supporter of open source. Combination of both put me in touch with Drupal.
Of course, Drupal is not the only open source CMS and in particular cases it's much more efficient to use other solutions.

When to use Drupal?

You need a site that is flexible enough to evolve in any direction.
For example, you might start with a blog but want the option of adding other features like a wiki, e-commerce, forums etc.
You need a site that can easily be configured to interact with other sites or with other technologies.
You need a site that can easily handle complex forms and workflows.
You need the ability to create your own content types.
You need the ability to quickly organize and display lists of information.
One or more of the many contributed Drupal modules addresses your needs.
You need to quickly develop custom functionality.
DIY modules, blocks etc.

When NOT to use Drupal?

Personal blog -> WordPress or one of the hosted blogging solutions
Drupal has out-of the-box blogging platform but the admin interface is quite complex
Wiki -> MediaWiki or hosted Wiki solutions
Possible to implement within Drupal with contributed modules (Wikitools or Diff) but again, much easier to use dedicated softwares
Forum -> SimpleMachines, phpBB, Vanilla
Although Drupal's forum module with forum enhancement modules may be better suited to extension if you'll need custom features.
Quick and simple website
Drupal is powerful tool, pretty complex and with learning curve.