Topic: Development

How to Give Your Project A Fighting Chance (Part 1)

“What we learn from lessons learned is that we don’t learn from lessons learned.” – T. Block So you are about to kickoff a project. You have a budget, a deadline, and a deliverable: an awesome website launch. As you already know, there are 3 criteria by which you’ll measure your project’s success: on time,

Read more »

The dreaded “MySQL has gone away” error

In environments where there are many databases running on the same machine (ex. shared hosting), or in high traffic environments (ex. enterprise sites) it is a common problem that unterminated connections to the database linger around indefinitely until MySQL starts spitting out the “Too many connections” error. The fix for this is decrease the wait_timeout

Read more »

A lesson in the usefulness of CSS sprite generators

The basic premise of a sprite image is to consolidate your site’s graphics into one (or more) master image file. Then, with the magic of CSS’s background-position property, you can shift the master sprite image around and only reveal the parts you want. Like a window. Some might even say like a Sliding Door. What

Read more »

Theming the User Login Block

Don’t want people to look at your site and immediately know it is Drupal? Theme your user login block! While it isn’t always your top priority, customizing the look and feel of the login form helps maintain the integrity of a custom design. In this post, I’ll get you started using both CSS and PHP

Read more »

Media Sprint in NYC a Success!

On October 23-24, Jonathan and I met with some of the top Drupal Media developers in NYC for a code sprint. The purpose of the sprint was to bring to fruition the vision of the Media module for Drupal 7, which will act as a unified media file browser for the Internet, allowing editors to

Read more »

Drupal Maintainability III – Self Documentation

It’s been a while since I’ve done an article in the Maintainability series, but that’s how the web business goes – alternating between insane activity and manageable momentum. This time we’re talking about writing self-documenting code. For those of you who write code, be it theming, CSS, module development, or anything else I think self-documenting

Read more »

TckTckTck

TckTckTck is a GCCA campaign calling for a new fair, strong, binding, and international climate change treaty. The Global Campaign for Climate Action recently formed to build a global groundswell for a strong climate deal in Copenhagen this December. GCCA is a collaboration of International NGOs inspired by the success of the Make Poverty History

Read more »

Stream Wrappers and You

This past weekend, a team of core Drupal developers, including Peter Wolanin (pwolanin), Andrew Morton (drewish), Jon Stacey (jmstacey), Justin Randell (justinrandell), Jody Hamilton (Jody Lynn), Alex UA (Alex UA), and myself, met at the Zivtech headquarters in Philly to hammer out some hot media and file functionality. After much arm-wrestling, teeth-gnashing, and nail-biting, plus

Read more »

10 Tips for Theming Drupal 6 Forms

In the last month, I’ve been working on a project that requires a very custom look and feel for login/register/adding content forms, and worked what I’ve learned into a presentation. Now I’ve got a little running list of tips for whipping Drupal forms into shape. Check out the Stealther plugin. If you are theming a

Read more »