Planet Drupal

The South by Southwest (SXSW) conference and Drupal hold a special place in our hearts. After all, it was at SXSW in 2008 that LevelTen first discovered the awesomeness that is Drupal. Since that date, we've never looked back! In support of our favorite content management system, here are all of the Drupal related panel pitches we could find. Hurry up and vote, too, since public voting ends tomorrow!

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no usability expert, but I do know pretty quickly when a feature on a site is hard, tedious or confusing. In that same vein I’m a sucker for when things make my life easier! I can do the same amount of work in less time to get to doing the things I enjoy; which is why I love these five easy Drupal usability modules. Setup on all of them is a snap and when you’re done you’ll actually have more free time, and we all need more of that.

CCK, Views, and Panels, are top Drupal modules we all know and love because they're necessary for building amazing Drupal websites; but what about the modules you haven’t heard of, those little gems that can really give your site something extra? I’m going to take a look at the top 5 Drupal modules that you might not know about but are worth a look. Some of them are still in Alpha or Beta so be sure install with caution as they may not be ready for prime-time.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about how much someone has to know to be considered an expert in their field and I’ve come to the conclusion that defining someone’s expertise is not easy. Take a doctor as an example; let’s say that this particular doctor is a neurosurgeon, quite possibly one of the most skilled and trained of all doctors, and that this doctor has been practicing for 10 years in his field. At that point I’d probably have no problem saying that they’re a neurological expert; however, that does not make him an expert podiatrist.

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a couple of clients who were using webform for registrations, and while it can work on a small scale, for their needs it just wasn’t right. The problem is that having used webform, their accustom to 3 things: an easy thank you message or page redirect to a thank you page, a generated email informing the site administrator about the submission and finally an easy to export option for the data from webforms.

LevelTen recently launched a series of SEO modules for Drupal with two primary goals: to continue Drupal's leadership as the premier SEO platform, and to make higher search engine rankings accessible for everyone.

Background

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 you deploy new features on a live site? The first, and most obvious problem was that the results of sitebuilding work needed to be exported to code.

I can't express how excited I am to be able to attend this years DrupalCon SF 2010; yes it's like a mini vacation and I know my wife hates that she doesn't get to tag along, but the sessions have been released and there are so many good topics that I'm upset I won't be able to attend them all.

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.

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 single-server sites there are 4 must-dos for performance. These are the biggest bang-for-the-buck performance improving techniques.