drupal

I wanted to display a summary of recent items from a data feed in a block, using the titles as links to view the entire article. After evaluating different ways of grabbing feeds, I decided on the Aggregation module, because it offered most of the features I needed, with the least aggregation <g>. But it didn't have the block feature I wanted, so I built my own module to do so, called Aggregation Block.

It's pretty simple; there is an admin page that looks for any feeds you've added, and allows you to expose it as a block. You can add a custom title, and limit the number of items displayed. Nothing fancy, just does the job.

You can see it on my Electronovelty site, which I use it to pull in Drupal articles from Glatzland. Read more »

A few tips for those starting out... there's a lot to do when building a new Drupal site! Here are some techniques I use, so I end up doing things in a consistent way.

Sorry if a lot of this is going to sound like mumbo-jumbo; I'm assuming you're familiar with some simple Unix commands, general development tools, and a bit about Drupal. If you see something you don't understand, a quick look on Drupal will probably clear it up for you. These are techniques I've found useful, but may not match your preferences, so feel free to adapt them to your likings. If you're new to Drupal, much of what I'm outlining is considered to be best practices (or at least pretty good ones), and I hope they will help you figure out some good deployment tools. Read more »

Ever wish you could work on coding a Drupal site without the hassle of the constant edit/ftp/test cycles? Or how about making changes when you have no Internet access available. Here are a few tricks many professional developers I know use; if you aren't aware of them yet, they could end up saving you a great deal of time and frustration. And it's always nice to be able to make some changes when inspiration strikes you, even when you're offline. Here's an approach I use with Drupal 6 sites.

The key is that Drupal is pretty much location agnostic; it is extremely easy to move a site from one hosting environment to another with just a few lines of code. Once you have a new environment configured, it will automatically use the correct configuration based on the URL. Read more »

I recently discovered the delights of the Fusion theme, comboed with the Skinrmodule. Very powerful and versatile, should make some theming tasks much easier. I tried creating a subtheme, which was pretty easy to do. One little issue, though; I'm using secondary menu links created as sublinks of the primary menu, and it is displayed at the top of the page. I wanted to move it to the left sidebar, but couldn't find a graceful way to move it to a block.

My solution was to create a tiny module to create the block. I prefer using code rather than adding a block that only lives in the database, since it will run faster and can be version controlled this way.

Here is a link to my Secondary menu block module. You can see the readme and download the code.

Being one to avoid religious arguments, I tend to not get too upset by some of the hoops Windows can put me through - but I will admit that Unix-based development usually has fewer mysteries to it. I've got a Mac and a Linux server, so why do I put up with Windows at all? Short answer is that as a professional Drupal developer, I can't imagine life without the phpED IDE. Simple as that. I hadn't used an IDE for years, but fell in love with phpED after Peter Lindstrom walked me through it a few Drupalcons ago. I've tried Eclipse and some other debuggers, but nothing comes close for productivity for me.

But there's still that Windows part, and as masochistic as I am at some times, there's now way I'm going to working the cmd window. Fortunately, we have cygwin, a pretty decent Unix shell that runs under Windows and allows me to use Unix commands and familiar tools. I use it in conjunction with the LAMP stack Xampp to have a pretty nice local dev environment. However, it has one foot in each world, and took me a little work to figure out how to get drush to work with it. Read more »