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Drupallets

Droplets of Drupal and Drupal-related wisdom…

5 May 2012 - 3:43am

Drupal Modules: The What, When, Where, Why, and especially How

Versions of this talk has been presented at:

What are modules?

Drupal is designed to be modular. Instead of always having every possible tool or feature in every site's code, you can just have those you're actually going to use.

21 March 2012 - 4:20pm

Hiring Drupal professionals, part 2: Know who they are

(This is the second installment of a multipart series. The first installment was Hiring Drupal professionals, part 1: Know what you need.)

So, you're advertising/searching for the kind of Drupaller you need, now what? How can you know if you've found them?

This can be quite a challenge if you aren't very familiar with Drupal yourself. But the general principles are the same as for hiring any other kind of professional outside your own sphere of expertise. You want to look at their reputation, talk to references, check out their prior work, and watch for warning signs. Of course, there are some Drupal specific details for doing these things, too.

18 June 2011 - 7:32pm

The Drupal Way

I've been asked what I meant by "The Drupal Way" in my Drupallets blog post Hiring Drupal professionals, part 1: Know what you need.

In the Drupal community, "Drupal Way" is used in two related, erm, ways. The primary meaning is a general ethos or guiding philosophy, but it also gets used to refer to specific applications of that ethos. In my blog post, I was referencing the general principle, The Drupal Way, as a whole. But google "the drupal way" and you will find lots of hits talking about specific applications of the Drupal way, that is, the Drupal way to do X or the Drupal way to do Y.

6 June 2011 - 2:49pm

Hiring Drupal professionals, part 1: Know what you need

(This is the first installment of a multipart series.)

As a Drupal trainer and consultant, I've been getting a lot of phone calls lately either asking if I have trainees to recommend or else hoping that the "consultant" in my job title is a synonym for developer. (It's not: I'm the kind of consultant who helps you figure out what to do rather than the kind that does it for you.) People are having a really hard time finding experienced Drupallers to hire.

28 May 2011 - 5:05am

Top Modules for Drupal 6.x (version 2.1)

Updated! This is the version that I presented at Drupal Camp Sacramento Area at 10 am on 28 May 2011, updated & expanded from the version I presented at DrupalCamp @ Stanford at 10 am on 2 April 2011.

Session description

More than three score and ten useful contributed modules for building Drupal sites.

There are many really useful contributed modules to take your site beyond the basics of Drupal core. There are modules to improve, allow, and/or help with everything from accessibility to workflow, from images to input formats, and beyond.

This session will be of interest to beginner and intermediate Drupallers, as well as those who manage or hire Drupallers or who are just trying to decide whether to use Drupal.

27 April 2011 - 2:15pm

Drupal is Lego, not a "learning curve"

In the LinkedIn group Drupal Community Network, there has been a discussion started by the question: "Drupal for a novice or newcomer? Good Bad , Ugly and why?"

This was my response to that question:

10 March 2011 - 1:03pm

Tweaking some colors

The Zen subtheme CTI_Flex comes with four color presets, called black, blue, red, and teal.

I like this theme, but one of our clients wanted a different color scheme to match the colors of their new building (green and orange). I was able to create a new "colorway" for this theme with just a little tweaking of images and templates. You can see this green/orange colorway in action at: http://midtownanimalclinic.com

8 February 2011 - 12:43pm

Choosing a hosting service for Drupal sites

Choosing a hosting service for your Drupal site can be a bit of an adventure. To help keep your adventure more on the fun or at least efficient side, here is my personal minimum set of technical requirements for a hosting service for Drupal sites. (These are more than the minimum requirements specified at Drupal.org —Drupal can run on Windows and/or use other databases, for example.)

28 January 2011 - 3:42pm

In praise of content wrangling

A website is nothing without content. And sometimes the content you start with needs a fair amount of "wrangling" before it is in good shape for the Web. Often this is true even if it was wonderful content before you started, because the Web has its own demands and ways of doing things.

Well-written and well-structured site content can not only convey your message, but educate, motivate and influence visitors who read it.

11 April 2010 - 6:14pm

Backup (Stanford) AFS Drupal site shell script

Now with version 1.2!

This is a Bourne shell script for backing up a Drupal site installed in a Stanford AFS group or department account. (This version doesn't work anywhere else.)

It does a dump of the Drupal database and creates a compressed archive of the entire Drupal directory from which it is run. Both the directory archive and .sql file are written to a DrupalBackups directory under the top level directory of the department or group account from which it is run. (If the DrupalBackups directory doesn't already exist, it is created.)

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