drupal archive

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Our new site design is live, so if you're reading this in a feed reader, please click on through! In a nutshell, we wanted to redesign to take advantage of Drupal 7, HTML5, and dramatically improve the readability and usability of the site as a whole. Read More…

We're just getting back from a great weekend at DrupalCampLA. A lot of topics were raised there but the message that really came home for me was this: as Drupal service providers we have to get CMS administrators to fall in love with Drupal. This is incredibly important in getting the people (not just developers) to buy in Drupal moving forward. It's not enough to get them to use Drupal because if they don't have a great experience they will blame the technology not the implementation. And if someone has a crappy CMS experience I'd rather it be some other CMS out there. Read More…

Do your clients love you with such a furious passion that it borders on problematic? Do you find new customers calling you and saying things like, "I must have your services! My friend has been bugging me all week to call you. Seriously, I just want him to stop camping out on my lawn. It's scaring the children." Read More…

Now that the Drupal community's migration to Git is in full swing, it's a great time to switch your own projects as well. Curious? Perhaps you saw the Git panel in San Francisco, or maybe you've listened to Sam Boyer campaigning passionately at your local DrupalCamp. Is there a rebel in your office who keeps going on about how much better life can be with git-svn? (How ironic that Subversion is now the establishment.) If you're just getting started, here are some tips I've collected over the last year. Or if you're already a Git ninja, here's how you can help. Read More…