Fri, 12/16/2011
Why do you want a website? Because everyone else has one? That's a really terrible reason. Websites are really tools to accomplish a goal. Too many companies set out to build a website without fully thinking this through.
Let me give you an example.
Fri, 11/04/2011
I'm sure most of you who are reading this are in love with Drupal and so am I. But I'm about to share with you one of the hard learned lessons about Drupal. That is, sometimes not doing it in Drupal is a better idea.
Fri, 09/23/2011
I hated the block system. There I said it. Many of you probably felt the same way. I've used everything I can think of to get around the block system and have built sites every different way imaginable. Recently though, I've had a revelation. The block system, while not perfect...
Thu, 09/08/2011
One of the things about maturing software is that there is lots of legacy code based on decisions that were made long ago. Oftentimes this is refactored or removed, but sometimes the concepts are so deep that they are there to stay. Something that has been rattling around in my...
Fri, 07/22/2011
Being a fast website is important both for SEO and for creating a pleasant experience for your website's visitors. While some of this is can be measured by how long it takes apache to respond, how fast a page renders in modern browsers is a more interesting and accurate way to...
Tue, 06/28/2011
If you have ever tried to run a site without any caching at all, you will pretty quickly appreciate the value it brings to a site. Caching is basically storing previous information requests and calculations and checking to see if it has already been done before doing it again....
Fri, 06/10/2011
I've just discovered my latest favorite new feature in Drupal 7. Cron Queues. Previously when trying to process large amounts of data (like sending 10,000 emails) we were left with trying to get Batch API and cron to work together. Not the easiest thing in the world.
Tue, 05/31/2011
One of the things that always gets my gander up when I get comps and mockups back from designers is when there are buttons in places that links should be. For whatever reason many designers/UI people really like buttons and put them all over the place. There are pretty defined...
Thu, 05/12/2011
We're approaching that time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to decide which version of Drupal to use for a new project. There are those of you out there who would probably say all projects should be in Drupal 7 from now on but that isn't reality for everyone yet. Each...
Mon, 04/25/2011
I've spent some considerable time researching video for Drupal the last couple of weeks, specifically the transcoding and hosting options. For Drupal 6 I knew there were lots of options but really needed to know what was quickly available for Drupal 7. Here is what I found....
Fri, 03/25/2011
We were in need of a new server that could quickly spin up sites for development but also was tuned for Drupal. Having followed and played with the different technologies that exist out there for hosting Drupal (Aegir, Mercury), I decided to try and create my "dream" server that...
Fri, 01/28/2011
One of our clients recently came to us with many product spec sheets that they wanted to make available on their website. Specifically, they wanted them presented in a collapsing folder view like in the file explorer or finder on a desktop. After thinking this through, I came up...
Fri, 01/14/2011
About.me has just come out of private beta. That means now anyone can sign up.
Thu, 01/13/2011
I tend to spend a lot of time tracking down and fixing bugs on our websites. After doing this for a while, I developed some tricks to quickly diagnose the problem. I'm going to walk you through a recent bug report and fix that I had to do and how I fixed it. Unfortunately...
Thu, 12/09/2010
After writing recently about the Brick Wall of Learning Drupal, I got a lot of responses from people frustrated with trying to learn Drupal. Clearly this a big issue. Some of the big challenges are discovering "best practices" and finding the "good modules." While there is no...
Thu, 11/18/2010
With just about anything new, there is a learning curve. Getting a new cellphone requires learning a new interface. Upgrading to a new operating system requires the same. Development tools also have learning curves, and Drupal is no exception. With Drupal though, it seems...
Tue, 11/02/2010
It is a rare website these days that doesn’t have some sort of audio or video player in it. When creating a website with Drupal, there are now quite a few options on how to do this. Choosing which one to use is now quite difficult.
Choices, Choices
Mon, 11/01/2010
In case you missed it, drupal.org got a big face lift this week. This is the culmination of a couple years of work by a lot of people and is a much needed improvement.
So what is new? Obviously the first thing people will notice is the new theme in Blue Cheese. The new theme...
Mon, 10/04/2010
Every now and then, LevelTen is approached by a client with a specific request that requires more than adding an available module. Such a case led to the design of the Spaces_Node module. The client wanted to be able to create promotional pages and add content, which is easy...
Thu, 09/02/2010
Hi all, I'm the "new guy" here at LevelTen. I've been added to the team here as a site builder/developer and am very excited to get started.
As a bit of an introduction, I'm a bit of a wanderer and have lived over 8 years of my life in Asia. I most recently lived in...
