We've been using Drupal 7 for all new sites for the past few months now, so we’ve put together a base site that we mirror to begin development on each new site. These are the contrib modules that we use on our base site. The modules in the Foundational and Everysite lists are always enabled by default.
Within the last couple of months one of our client’s websites was hacked. This is a rarity, and we responded swiftly to restore a previous version of the site; however, we still needed to get rid of the actual problem. Through the experience there were a number of lessons learned that anyone, whether client or developer could benefit from.
The addition of Fields in Drupal 7 core has created quite a shakeup in the modules that interact with fields and create new kinds of fields. In Drupal 6 they were all CCK field modules, but now many of them have changed names or been replaced completely with new modules that better leverage the Drupal 7 entity concept. Over the last few month, these five modules have become some of my favorites for those sites that need more complexity in the fields that are created and how they relate to one another.
The References module contains the ‘node reference’ and ‘user reference’ modules that were separate in Drupal 6. There are two other approaches to this same idea in the Relation and Entity Reference modules, but I find this module just works the way I expect without any headache even though it’s only a beta.
An early new year’s resolution for me is to become more involved in the Drupal community. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for months, but Angie “webchick” Byron’s keynote at DrupalCamp Austin on November 19 gave me the tangible steps and motivation to jump in. It has been a lot easier to get involved than I anticipated.
Without going into the positives and negatives of Rackspace’s Cloud Sites platform, there are a few tips that we’ve learned that will help you Run, Deploy and Maintain a Drupal 7 site on this platform.
I recently attended DrupalCamp Austin and went to several sessions on mobile. It was a little funny how they contradicted each other. One session would talk about how mobile is the way to go then another session would talk about going responsive. I've been on the fence on which I think is the right approach. I've done lots of mobile sites, but I hadn't jumped into the responsive world yet. So for a recent project, I decided to give it a try.
By mobile, I'm talking about creating a site with a different HTML/CSS markup but serving the same content. When I do mobile, I generally use a tool to determine if the user is on a mobile device and then I serve the different content designed for the mobile device.
When we get a new client, we're excited. The designer can't wait to jump into Photoshop and make something beautiful. The developer can't wait to see the Photoshop comps and start programming. But we're missing a step!
When web developers moved from table-based to non-table-based layouts, the syntax change was relatively simple: use a <div> element instead of <table>, <tr>, or <td>. The hard part was learning how to use position, float, and clear in your css to make it all look right.
With over a quarter of the world’s estimated four billion mobile phones able to access the web, mobile Internet is poised to overtake desktop usage by 2015. More people are using mobile search than ever before, and ignoring mobile website development is a luxury you won’t be able to afford for much longer.
Drupal is a powerful content management system. I sometimes joke with clients that I've used every CMS out there but I landed on Drupal because of its flexibility and power.
The truth is, I'm an opportunist; I pull together a suite of solutions based on budget and requirements. Sometimes I may do everything in Drupal. Sometimes, however, I may pull in a different solution even though Drupal could do it too. I use Drupal as the foundation, but other products can be integrated.
I think everyone should try working this way. Don't spend hours and hours to get Drupal to do something when there is a great product right next to you.
