Drupal

Aimed at those with a knowledge of HTML and CSS but with no prior experience of programming, Drupal 5 Themes sets out to show you how you can quickly and easily get a drupal site up and running with a highly customised look and feel. Drupal is highly themeable, with most aspects of the user interface being accessible purely in the theme layer without needing to dip into module development or the CMS’ core. The book takes the user through the various theme hooks and introduces the simple PHP code needed to override them, add new ‘regions’ (in which blocks can be displayed), customise existing themes and create your own (almost) from scratch. The primary focus is on the default theme engine, PHPTemplate, but others are referenced and a little time is spent on the options for building your own theme using raw PHP (without the extra layer of a theme engine). ...

A couple of months ago I found myself needing to generate a “tag cloud” in drupal. The contents of the cloud would be all the children categories of a container and as is the norm with tag clouds it needed to display those children at varying sizes based on how popular they are. I looked around at the existing options but none fitted my requirements in how they integrated with the category module, or producing semantically helpful html. ...

It’s surprising given drupal’s popularity that there aren’t more books covering it in detail. Site launches and contributions by the likes of lullabot and bryght have pushed the CMS’ profile and recent releases have emphasised the Web 2.0 potential, but a quick look at amazon reveals only four related titles. Of the four, Pro Drupal Development is definitely the most developer focussed. ...

As I’ve indicated here a few times, when announcing site launches and offering a few hints and tips, I fairly frequently find myself working with Drupal but have long had reservations about doing so. What I’ve so far avoided doing is going into much detail about why that would be, what those reservations are, and so on. But now I’m working on a review of a Drupal book and so it seems appropriate to lay those cards on the table and look at the details on them. It seems easiest to do that by comparing with the framework I do most of my development in: Ruby on Rails. ...

With a few projects coming to an end it turns out I have some time on my hands that I could do with filling with some paying work. I’m an experienced web developer, having been building sites and applications for eleven or twelve years now. I prefer to work with Ruby on Rails, and have been doing so for two years, but am comfortable in a range of environments and want my tools to match the project as well as possible. I frequently find myself working with drupal, and as an eight-year PHP veteran, that’s okay. ...

In yesterday’s post on creating custom product types in drupal I promised a follow up on how we were adding the license generation to our checkout. I’m not going to go through all the steps in great detail as most of what I wrote is specific to our situation, and the custom PHP module (written in C) that generates our licenses, but it took me a while to work out how to hook in, so here are a few words. ...

For the Scodigo site we wanted to be able to sell licenses to use the SmartPill PHP Edition plugin. For the most part that just involves a standard ecommerce flow, and so we opted to use drupal’s suite of ecommerce modules, but we wanted to make some customizations along the way, such as being able to offer product variations (eg. different user counts for the licenses) and generating and emailing a license rather than shipping a product or delivering access to a file. To achieve that I created two custom modules: a product type called ’licensable’ and a license management module creatively titled ’licenses.' ...

UPDATE: This post was written using Capistrano 1, which has since been superseded. An updated version—covering deployment of Drupal with Capistrano 2—can be found here. It’s easy to get spoiled building rails apps. Tools like migrations make it so much easier to keep databases in sync, the way environments are managed helps considerably, and there’s Capistrano which makes rapid deployments a breeze. I miss those things when I have to work with other systems. ...

Back in August I wrote about SmartPill PHP Edition. SmartPill PHP Edition is a plugin for the filemaker database that embeds the PHP engine, opening up a whole new world of flexibility and open source tools to Filemaker developers. For the past couple of months I’ve been working with Samuel Bowles and Micah Woods (President/Founder of Scodigo) to launch the Scodigo website, promoting that plugin and their other services. As befits a site promoting a PHP plugin, it’s PHP driven, using drupal for content management and ecommerce features, and a few custom modules that do things like generate licenses for SmartPill on the fly. If time allows, I may write up some notes on how we did that. ...