Dustin Currie's blog

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 discovering this tool, the extent of my use of markup validation was to pass URLs to the the official W3C validator or open one of several validator plugins for various browsers.

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 not a commitment. I have seen, time and time again, estimates turned into commitments and estimators are then held accountable for their estimates, resulting in long hours for developers, monetary losses for development companies, and angry clients.

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. And no programming is needed.

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 section.

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 write and then link to a site that is wholly unrelated to anything. The post is always on topic but lazy. I don't think these are bots. We'll find out if Mollom blocks those types of posts.

Please comment away!

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.

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 is the step-by-step process for doing so.

1. Create a date string

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 resorting to any PHP template or HTML coding using the first two steps.

First: Edit the order of fields

From the content type edit page, click on the Manage fields tab. The URL is admin/content/node-type/[mynodetype]/fields
From here, drag and drop the fields in the order you want them displayed.

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 address this issue. Set the property to true.

$('.mycycleclass')
  .cycle({ 
    fx:  'scrollHorz',
    cleartype:  true,
    cleartypeNoBg:  true,
});

More info

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 development. We use xhtml, semantic markup and good structure in building our sites. For the rest of the day you will see a LevelTen site that is CSS free!