Topic: Development

How To Ensure Your Web Development Project is a Complete Failure

Our workshop at Netroots Nation was a huge hit so by popular demand we’re sharing Aaron’s slides. The presentation is called “How to Ensure Your Web Development Project is a Complete Failure”. Our section of the presentation addresses the project management mishaps that can happen when nonprofits (and really anyone) want to launch a web

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Fine-grained caching with Views

A lot of very interesting things are happening to make Drupal’s caching system a bit smarter. One of my favorite recent (albeit smaller) developments is a patch (http://drupal.org/node/1471200) for the Views module that allows for cached views to have no expiration date. This means that the view will remain in the cache until it is

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Responsive Design Tips from DrupalCon

Ah, Drupalcon. Three days of panels and BOFs, one Advomatic code sprint, and some very late nights with the Advoteam. Now I’m thrust back into the land of overflowing diaper pails and spaghetti bits everywhere that is work-from-home motherhood. But I promised myself I’d put my DrupalCon notes into a fancy blog post in the

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Removing fields from CiviCRM

Sometimes after launching a new site our clients find that there are fields and features in CiviCRM that they don’t use. We are working with a client that wants to remove all fields and features that aren’t useful in order to simplify their user interface and make it easier to use. This includes things like

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Flowing a list view into two columns

Columns. While it may seem like a good idea to a graphic designer, the idea of newspaper-style columns strikes fear in the hearts of themers everywhere. In particular, you may run into an instance where you need a list view to be A-L in the first column, then M-Z in the second column. I’ll walk

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Build a Filterable Staff Directory in Drupal 6 or 7

Here’s a beginner-level Drupal CCK/Views site building recipe for creating a nicely filterable Staff page. After making one like this for a recent project in Drupal 6, I was both pleased and annoyed to discover how easy it is to build in Drupal 7, now that fields are in core. I’ll show you both ways

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Notable changes to theming in Drupal 7

There are 50+ changes to the theme system in the move to Drupal 7 – that’s a lot to consider when upgrading your theme from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. As expected, some of the changes make theming more complex… but those changes can also free things up for you to do complex things in

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Webcam Magic!

Here is a recipe for the holy grail of video handling on your server: recording a video with a webcam from the browser, upload it to YouTube, and embed it on your site, all with one magic click. This technique is currently only possible with Drupal 6, although support for Drupal 7 should be ready

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Designing for Drupal: DOs and DON’Ts

“Drupal sites can look any way you want!” Heard this before? While technically true, it doesn’t mean it’s always the best option. If you are a graphic designer creating comps (compositions) for a Drupal site, here are a few DOs and DON’Ts to follow. Not only can they make theme developers happy, but also they

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Arm yourself with Drupal $body_classes!

A common question I get for theming Drupal sites is how to apply css to specific pages. For example, you might want your background image for your header to change on specific pages. Out of the box, Drupal doesn’t give you any class in the HTML that’s unique to your node to grab onto. This

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