Recent posts about Content Management Systems

Drupal Coda Book

I'd been itching to try out Coda as my development tool, and their recent 3 day sale meant I got a copy for $45. It's pretty good so far, I have a couple of issues with it that I'll cover in a later post. One really nice thing about it is the Books feature. This allows you to add reference material to your Coda development environment and search it without having to go to a browser. I'm always needing the Drupal API, well I actually use this one http://drupalcontrib.org/, which is a brilliant Core and Contrib API, perfect for those tricky Views or Webform moments. Setting up a book is really easy, and here is a screen shot of the settings for a book for Drupal 5 and Drupal 6.

Our Theme Toolkit

So we (Christopher and I) are at DrupalCon, and one of the questions to the floor at The Themer's Toolkit was "What theme toolkit do you use?". I thought I'd give a quick overview of our toolkit:

Theme

We've been using a custom three column layout that Christopher developed way back when, but recently we've been tweaking it considerably, to include new features such as video support, stylesheet switching, custom search form and IE support. It's now similar to Zen in many ways and provides context/content specific classes and ids for ease of styling. We have plans for the future to create a more flexible theme based on CSS frameworks.

Views random sort not working

Recently we developed a simple view that used a random sort to pull one node of a certain content type on each page visit. This is easy to set up and provides satisfactory results. We set it up, logged out, refreshed the page and it didn't work. The first load was random, but any refresh after that resulted in the same node. Frustrated as to why this was happening I went digging in the view, then in the theming, and after about an hour debugging, realized that site caching was enabled. So that's a bit of a problem,

"Views random sort does not work the way you would expect with caching enabled "

Displaying Webform results in a block

We use the webform module for most of our form needs on our client sites. It's a pretty good module that provides most of the functionality required. The most important part of the webforms module is the submission data. The reason for the form in the first place is to gather data that can be analyzed and then acted on. Webform has a results area where you can view all the submitted data, analyze it, download it and export it. It does this using some useful built in functions such as webform_get_submissions.

However, say you want to get the number of submissions to a particular field in a form and then display the most popular choices in a block, a little similar to a poll but the data is collected as part of a webform. For our example, the form is collecting a list of reasons for donating and then displaying the top 5 reasons in a block on the site.

Search Engine Friendly URL's and Drupal - Part 2

In my previous post I showed you how to set the friendly URL for each page/piece of content on your site. Hand curating can be fun, but it's also time consuming and requires a little thought. It can also be a little cumbersome when you have a long title, like the title of this post. In steps the Path Auto module to save the day. In conjunction with the Token module, Path Auto automates the task of creating and setting these URL's. How does it work? It's pretty simple really.