After weeks of research reviewing the most popular themes on D.O and many group discussions, I finally began the design and development of my first theme to be released to the Drupal community.

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

Hello, my name is Tom Nelson. I was hired recently by Levelten as a front end developer/themer and am getting settled in.

I'm originally a native of Texas, but have only lived here for seven years after living in the midwest and west coast for most of my life. I was a music major in college before switching to IT and have been working as a web developer for the last three years.

I recently had an issue displaying jQuery Media full-screen videos in Drupal 6. After a little research, reading some threads and some trial and error, I was able to successfully display videos in full-screen mode. The fix ended up being quite simple, but there didn't seem to be a lot of documentation so here it is.

My Situation:

This fix assumes that you you're using jQuery Media module and successfully playing the video through JW Player of similar.

The Quick Fix:

1. Go to: Administer > Configuration > jQuery Media
2. Select Advanced Settings

I've recently been researching the differences between content management systems and blogging engines and thought I would discuss some key differences I've found in Drupal and WordPress. LevelTen has experience installing, configuring and theming both and each has its strengths and weaknesses. I feel the deciding factors come down to your long-term goals for the application.

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

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 arrays with the key of the first array as the name of the module. This is to namespace the settings. This will keep your settings from overriding others and others from overriding yours.

//PHP code in your module or in a PHP snippet anywhere on your site
 
$jquery_settings = array(
  'myModule' => array(
    'mySetting1' => 'myvalue1', 
    'mySetting2' => 'myvalue2' )
);
drupal_add_js($jquery_settings, 'setting');

Earlier this week, Stephanie put together a really cool design for our portfolio section on the LevelTenDesign.com Web site. It was based off of a jQuery snippet she found that emulates the Coda slider (http://www.panic.com/coda/).