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by Joaquin Lippincott, President
Wordpress is great - and so is Drupal. They are different platforms and should be selected for different projects depending on the needs. So how do you make the choice? Here are a few questions you should ask yourself: Read More…
by Chuck Vose, Web Developer
I've now been working professionally in Drupal for a year and have learned a lot about it; I have some patches into contrib but I've not really done much with core other than some simpletests I was too shy to commit at Drupalcon and some comments trying to help people out on d.o. Prior to my stint as Drupal programmer I was a hardcore Ruby on Rails developer for about 4 years. Over the last two years in particular I've learned a lot about frameworks and I'd like to share an observation about which framework feels right to me for which situations and why. Read More…
by Scott Vandehey, CSS Ninja
Like any Drupal themer, I've done my share of grumbling about the frequently ridiculous level of nested divs with dozens of classes. I'd heard some people mention a module called Semantic Views, but I never really understood what it was for until I found this video. If you don't understand what the big deal is either, take the four minutes to watch. It's a total "ah-ha!" moment. I'm happy to say that I just used Semantic Views for the first time on a client site, and it's just as awesome as everyone says. It saved me a ton of work and let me get exactly the markup I wanted, even while working around Chuck's nested views. Read More…
by Julie Baumler, Web Developer
Having spent the last 5 months supporting on a multi-language multi-site project, I've learned quite a bit about multibyte safe code, so I thought I'd share some key highlights. Read More…
by Dylan Tack, Web Developer
Last week, I wrote about graphing JMeter results with Matplotlib. Let's take a closer look at the actual Drupal test plan. This plan was adapted from Jacob Singh's test and has five different thread groups: Anonymous browsing, Authenticated browsing, Editing a node, Search, and Login and view user page. The revised test plan is available for download. Read More…
by Chuck Vose, Web Developer
As you have probably figured out, I love views. I love teasing out little features that are completely buried and obscure. Nesting Views is one of my favorite new travesties; not sure if it's ready for Drupal for Evil, but it's certainly not kosher. If birds can nest, why can't I? image by Benjamin Verdonck, reported by apartmenttherapy.com Read More…
by Chuck Vose, Web Developer
NOTE: Apologies for the gap, I said I would post on Monday but well, I decided to get married instead. So there. You might be saying to yourself, "So Chuck, D7UX is all well and good right, but I'm running D6 right now. How can your wisdom possibly enhance my life and vitality?" Well, you're in luck friend, for my limited stints into D7 have left me craving more of that optimized UX goodness and blogging is a side-effect of learning for me. Today, not in fact monday like I had promised, not like my promise really means anything to my adoring audience anyways, I want to talk about getting users around Drupal in the fastest way possible. In addition, I want to talk about some roles and permissions that will result in less training and less support calls. Read More…
by Joaquin Lippincott, President
As a long time Google Ad user, I've been a big fan of the ability to submit ads on Google. It's (relatively) easy and allows you to tailor your ads based on : Search term Location (Geographically) Time All of this is great, right? Compared to everything out there it was really great and very affordable. But that was close to 2006. Fast forward to 2010 and the rates aren't so affordable anymore. In the space for web development key words, I've seen costs go from as little as $0.50 per click to more than $4.00 per click for top billing for the same keywords. That's 800% of what costs used to be. With that kind of rate, I found I needed to turn down and then turn off Google Ads. Read More…
by Joaquin Lippincott, President
Taking the time to make the Drupal admin friendlier is rarely on the top list of priorities for clients. That said, as service providers we know the long term grief ignoring the admin can cause for administrators. You've heard it before: "How did I do that again?", "Man, I wish this were easier!" One of the places that you can easily improve the experience is in the user administrative section. Users are really just usernames and roles, but how do you get a better view of the data and make it easier to manage? Creating a custom View with exposed filters is a great first step. Here's a side-by-side comparison of the default user management screen and a custom View I created in about 15 minutes of work: Read More…
by Dylan Tack, Web Developer
If you've ever used JMeter, you know it's an awesome load testing tool. It also comes with a built-in graph listener, which allows you to watch JMeter do, well... something. While this gives a basic view of response time and throughput, it doesn't show failures, nor how the server responds as load increases. And let's face it, it's just plain ugly. Enter Matplotlib, a beautiful (though complex) plotting tool written in Python. Read More…