Drupal

Yesterday I wrote about Day 1 of Drupal Camp Austin 2010, and today I'll finish up with my highlights from Day 2, which I actually got a lot more out of! Read more about Drupal Camp Austin 2010, Day 2: A Review

This past weekend, I attended Drupal Camp Austin, a two-day conference at the AT&T Center that hosted a lot of really great presentations on various Drupal and general web topics. It was my first conference, and a good experience. I've always been a little anti-conferences, but this weekend may have changed that stance. Here is some of what I most enjoyed from the first day, and some links to resources that I found out about from the conference.

Sometimes you just want to break up your Drupal menus into sub-menus, but with headers that aren't links themselves. For example, say you want a menu like the one pictured here, and you'd like to implement it as one menu tree within Drupal. "Looking & Telling" and "Making" need to be menu items, but they aren't actually links to pages; they're just there to group menu items in a nice way. There is the Special Menu Items module to do it, but it does currently have some bugs, and there is actually a simple, theme-based way to achieve the same thing. Here's how.

Have you seen this new site Interhoods? It uses Dribbble and GitHub profiles and mashes them up with a map to give you an idea of who the web designers and developers are in your neighborhood, and city. Right now they only offer the service for people in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. I think they should add Austin next. Read more about How to Get to Know the Austin Web / Tech Creative Community

Today I want to cover how to use those built-in drag and drop tables (the ones where you can sort the rows however you want) in Drupal, in the context of setting a weight field in a custom module. There was a pretty good article about this by Computer Minds, but I found some parts of their approach buggy, and not what I prefer, stylistically. So, consider this article my improvements upon their work.

If you use Subversion to manage code updates to your Drupal-based site, then chances are that whenever an update to the Drupal core comes out, it's really annoying to use. You don't want to go copying your sites/ directory from the old version to the new, since all your .svn directories are in the old version. It's just a big headache. Luckily, there's basically one command you have to run to painlessly update Drupal (with just a little bit of set up). Here's how: Read more about How to Update Your Drupal Install Using Subversion

A couple of weeks ago I had a client request to change the search box on their site to have the text "SEARCH" appear inside of the text area on their search form. Some searching led me to a couple of posts on drupal.org about how to go about this, but the way that I chose ended up actually being in the comments on one of those posts.

If you have comments activated on your Drupal site, and you allow non-members to leave comments, by default Drupal will append "(not verified)" to the names of people who leave comments and aren't logged in to your site. On many sites (like mine, for instance), people aren't even allowed to register accounts, meaning every comment has that pesky "(not verified)" text with it! I find that unfriendly, so here's how you can change that.

Because of some recent need I had to do some search engine optimization (SEO) and spam blocking, I've come across some really great Drupal modules that I wanted to mention. A lot of you out there who build Drupal sites may already know about them, but here goes...