drupal

Part 4 of a series: Building out a full Drupal site in a weekend.

Well, after having a successful launch day, ironing out a few small bugs in the CSS of the layout, and patting myself on the back, I decided to push the initial release of the 'Airy Blue' theme created for Open Source Catholic out to Drupal's Theme repository. It turns out working with CVS isn't the hell-on-earth I thought it would be, but it's still a heckuva lot to expect from a guy who logs less than an hour a day in a command-line interface!

I applied for a CVS account, then read through the plentitude of CVS documentation for themers on drupal.org, making a few notes here and there. After having my CVS account approved, I finally had some time to fire up Terminal, and go through the process of first 'checking in' to CVS, then uploading my theme directory, and finally 'committing' and 'tagging' it for release on my project page.

>> It's a lot easier to zip up the files and link to them, let me tell 'ya! <<

Anyways, enough about that process (if you ever need help, jump into the #drupal IRC channel and see if webchick's around. If she is, she'll help you in no time!); here's the description of Drupal's newest contrib theme, Airy Blue:

Part 3 of a series: Building out a full Drupal site in a weekend.

Now that my feet are firmly on the ground (and hopefully will stay that way for a time), I have a little time to write about the final stages of the Open Source Catholic website development... even though it's tagged as in 'beta.'

On the plane flight home, I was mostly finished creating the theme for the site. I hadn't opened it up in IE 6/7/8 yet, but I knew the main three or four bugs that would crop up, and prepared for them. I decided to write some postings (two articles, two blog posts, and a website review) for the website, as it's never a good idea to try to build momentum for a website on which nothing exists!

Part 2 of a series: Building out a full Drupal site in a weekend.

Well, one plane flight down, and a conference to go, I have the main structure of the theme set up (locally; haven't pushed it out to opensourcecatholic.com yet). I decided to go with Zen 2.x's -dev releases, for the simple fact that it's new and the way the Zen project is moving. There are a few rough areas in the documentation, mostly in the 'Readme' file for installing a subtheme, but I got through everything okay.

This theme, I hope, will make its way onto the fine Drupal.org theme repository; getting a CVS account, I'm sure, will be fun ;-)

Part 1 of a series: Building out a full Drupal site in a weekend.

Before you start building your website, you need to get all the parts of the site together, and have a good plan for what you'll need and how you'll do it. For many organizations, this can be a huge hassle, as you'll have to go through planning meetings, make diagrams, have all kinds of changes, and end up pre-stressed... and that's before you start working on putting the site together!

Luckily, for this website, the requirements are pretty simple: I can do whatever I want. But I can't get started from that point, so I put a few requirements down on paper, then grabbed everything I needed.

This weekend I am going to attend the Catholic New Media Celebration. I'll be on two plane flights, I'll be sitting at an airport for a few hours before each flight, and I'll be at a convention all day Saturday. I'm hoping to build out a new site idea I've had lurking in the back of my head for some time: Open Source Catholic.

In the past 45 minutes, I've been jumping around Drupal.org downloading all the different modules and tutorials I think I'll need. I've also saved some of my previous work on other Drupal sites in case I need to refer to a code snippet along the way while I don't have Internet access. I'm going to call it a night for now (I need to pack!), but tomorrow, beginning at the airport, I'm going to start working on the site.

To the uninitiated, Boost is a module for Drupal which has the potential to make your Drupal-based website run many times faster than it's currently running. Boost basically converts pages on a Drupal site into static html files, and allows your website to direct anonymous (non-logged-in) users to the cached html pages.

Doing so speeds your site up quite a bit, because instead of your web server having to run some PHP scripts and connect to your website's database, the server can simply send the complete html file, which requires no extra processor cycles or memory to compile. If your website has a lot of anonymous traffic, the potential speedup is very large. Instead of serving hundreds of users per minute, you could serve thousands.

I recently had a problem with cron on one of my Drupal sites, related to an issue I'll be posting about soon (namely, using Drupal's built-in search with more than 4.5 million entries in the search_index table). When I manually tried running cron, I got a "Cron failed" status message. I checked the log, and it said "Attempting to re-run cron while it is already running."

Apparently, something had messed up (probably due to the fact that I was messing with database tables while cron was working on them) with the previous cron job, and Drupal couldn't start a new cron job anymore. So, with the handy help of Google, I found part of a solution to my cron woes in the Drupal.org forums. Here's what I did to prevent this cron error from happening again:

Recently, an article on Accessibility appeared on Planet Drupal which caught my eye, so I clicked on it. When I was taken to the article page on d7ux.org, the banner across the top of the page caught my eye (as it was intended to do!):

Our UX Principles:

1. Make the most frequent tasks easy and less frequent tasks achievable.
2. Design for the 80%.
3. Privilege the content creator.
4. Make the default settings smart.

I think those four principles, especially numbers one and two, should be the driving force behind any web or product design.

In what will be the first of, I hope, many case studies, I review the process of redesigning the Saint Louis Review website, from the ground up.

The Saint Louis Review is a local Catholic diocesan newspaper serving the nearly 500,000 member Archdiocese of Saint Louis. The newspaper has had a website since the late 90s, which was ported to a custom-designed CMS in 2001. The PHP/MySQL-based site ran quite well throughout the first decade of this millennium, but was in need of either a serious overhaul or a redesign, to go along with the paper's new tabloid layout in April 2009.

The decision was made in 2007 to port the website to Joomla, but after a few months, a new editor, and more work, it was determined that, due to its extensibility, flexible out-of-the-box permissions, and standards/SEO-compliant codebase, Drupal would be a better fit for the site. Work was begun in January of 2009 to transfer the custom CMS' articles database (over 17,000 articles) to a Drupal site, create a new template based off the colors and design of the new tabloid-format paper, and integrate an easier-to-manage ad system and back-end.