my blog

Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, has summarised a fascinating set of events surrounding how Microsoft posted anti Drupal advertising via Google Adwords yesterday. Several of the Drupal community noticed and began Tweeting about it. Before long a firestorm of chat was occurring and Microsoft noticed and reacted in an admirable way considering on the one hand they were trying to compete with Drupal and on the other they positively promote Drupal.

Read More here

Getting Flex working with Drupal is relatively straight forward so long as you set up your flex project environment using these following these steps.

Install as3Corelib into the lib directory of your Flex Project

<mx:Script>

        <![CDATA[import these into your flex project using the following actionscript

The imagecache module for Drupal has to be one of the most superb available. Some of the power of imagechace is in the capability to generate on the fly derivative images at a module level.

I just wanted to share this snippet which creates within php or a module an instance of a preset imagecache image.

Once you have clean urls (search engine friendly), meta descriptions, <title> tags, header tags and ensured you have the correct keyword density on your pages what else is there to do?

Enter Siloing / Page Rank Sculpting

Siloing (categorisation) is the process of organising either physically or via use of links your site content into logical subject areas so that you communicate a focused message about the subject areas you cover on your site to the search engines.

There are some useful articles on this subject here

Use an advanced google search to locate Drupal Websites which allow users to comment with links. The important thing is to search within the context of the term you are optimising for.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22street+furniture%22+environmental+%22Allowed+HTML+tags%3A+%3Ca%3E%22&btnG=Search

I have just tried out the demo of Concrete5 CMS. I can only say from a user experience perspective this CMS is wildly better than any I have seen. I have been using Drupal for 3 years now and must admit that in comparisson it feels a little clunky.

We are migrating over to Ubercart from Ecommerce module on our Drupal sites. The Ubercart project has a bigger momentum and the api is more robust and complete. The more we look at Ubercart, the more we like it! Here is a presentation about Ubercart from the recent Drupalcon in Washington DC.

 The following will switch the users theme to pushbutton. You could use this code to change the users theme based on any logic you like.

<?php 

global $user;
user_save($user, array('theme' => 'pushbutton'));

?> 

Drupal is a powerful platform to develop with. When combined with Flash via the services module you can create some wonderful rich applications. I have recently been working on a toolset which allows customers to design large format vinyl banners online. This is a great example of a flash powered rich internet app.

For those who are still using Drupal 5 (which is most people i think) there is an excellent pdf download Drupal Theme Developers Cheat Sheet.