Thu, 02/03/2011
Developers spend a significant amount of time keeping up with technologies. It's incredibly tough (and fun) in the open-source world as all new technologies are available for you to experiment and play with. You can also contribute and shape these new technologies. I've...
Tue, 01/25/2011
It wasn't until recently that people began to use Drupal sites within very well structured development workflows. This move brought to light some decisions that have proven painful.
Vocabularies and terms may be coupled tightly with a feature (so that neither makes sense to...
Thu, 12/16/2010
I'm late to the Drush party. I've been using it for what seems like forever, but I haven't taken advantage of some of the newer and really cool features.
Earlier this year Drush got support for aliasing, sql syncing and file syncing. And with that the last of my reasons for...
Wed, 10/20/2010
If your server only allows public key ssh, you may want to allow ssh via password.
We run across these servers from time to time, most frequently on Pantheon/Mercury sites, as password ssh authentication has been disabled by default. I could be wrong, but I think disabling of...
Wed, 10/06/2010
We often run across parts of Drupal that are not yet exportable using a tool like features.
Quicktabs is one such part. It's a neat module for a lot of Drupal sitebuilders to use. Quicktabs allows a sitebuilder to create tabbed displays of Drupal content from sources like...
Thu, 05/27/2010
Drupal projects have grown to rely heavily on sitebuilding. Website creators use Drupal modules like Views and CCK to create site architecture. While sitebuilding patterns have become incredibly powerful and time-saving they created a significant deployment problem: How do...
Mon, 03/22/2010
Tom got an AWS account this weekend, so I decided to geek out on it.
On Sunday I pulled the trigger and put leveltendesign.com up Amazon's Web Services using Chapter Three's Mercury AMI.
I'll write more about this later, but I just wanted to share this before I leave tonight:
4,...
Wed, 02/03/2010
With W3C Validator module, you can validate markup on all nodes and views in a Drupal site.
I have been on the lookout for several years now for a good tool to validate markup across an entire site. The Drupal module w3c_validator does almost exactly what I want.
Prior to...
Fri, 01/15/2010
Web site performance is an expansive topic. Like just about any aspect of Web development, a career can be made out of becoming knowledgeable on performance. A career can even be made out of becoming a Drupal performance expert (David Strauss is doing just that). I find for...
Fri, 11/20/2009
Estimating is one of the more difficult and risky parts of development. A good estimator is valuable, but even more valuable is a team that understands what an estimate is and what an estimate is not.
An estimate is an approximation of the bigness or size of a project; it is...
Thu, 06/18/2009
By default, views of type Term link to category pages (taxonomy/term/[tid]). I find that category pages are more useful as custom views where you can control fields. You can effectively replace the default category pages with a customized view by following this views recipe....
Thu, 06/18/2009
I am currently on a project that requires a 2-level drop down navigation and a sidebar block that displays the pages in the current section. This is not the first or second time I have used this recipe so it's time to share. This block can be used to display other pages in a...
Fri, 06/12/2009
In an effort to test out Mollom and foster more talk on the blogs, we have enabled anonymous commenting.
LevelTen has a very high page rank in Google and is frequently targeted by link builders. They'll register for an account, write something that takes only a minute to...
Mon, 06/01/2009
I wrote up a doc detailing Drupal related stuff that needs to be done to launch a Drupal site. Here is the info for discussion and anyone who finds this useful.
Tue, 05/19/2009
Drupal provides a clean way of formatting dates any way you want throughout the entire site.
Earlier today, Rachel commented that an upcoming events block on a site we are working on displayed the date in an ugly format. So I changed it and for anyone who is interested, here...
Wed, 04/22/2009
Here is a 5-step process to have full control over the output of a node. This method lets you stay at the theme/display level and gives you full control over output without having to implement any hooks in a module. You'll often find that you can get the desired output without...
Mon, 04/13/2009
jQuery Cycle has a bug in IE 7 and 8 where a white background is added to cycle elements. That will override background images. If your cycle object has a background image and you use the cleartype fix, the background won't show. Cycle has a property 'cleartypeNoBg' to...
Thu, 04/09/2009
Today is Naked Day and we are participating at LevelTen. We try to practice what we preach and that certainly includes adhering to Web standards. These standards promote interoperability between Web sites, ensure accessibility and helps provide a standardized platform for...
Wed, 04/08/2009
Adding the following code in any PHP area in Drupal will give you settings values available client-side that you can use when writing JavaScript code.
Pass a key/value associative array to drupal_add_js() and give it type value of 'setting'. Note that I am using an array of...
Wed, 04/08/2009
Here is the node skeleton for Drupal 6 for anyone who cares and for me to reference :)
This contains hook_views_api which requires the views module. The code inside the implementation of hook_views_api assumes views exports are in mymodule/includes/*
The code inside hook_enable...
