Last week we were evaluating solutions for a client and I had the opportunity to install and test Drupal Commerce (DC) for the first time. Digett and I both have a long history of Ubercart use, but since we made the move to Drupal 7 in the middle of last year none of our new website builds have needed a full shopping cart system.
I have developed very large, very small and every size website between. I have rolled my own CMS, used (and even developed extensions for) Typo3, Wordpress, Expression Engine, Mambo & Joomla, WebGUI, SharePoint, MonkCMS/Ekklesia360, DotNetNuke and Drupal. By far, I have been most loyal to Wordpress and Drupal.
As a client or potential client of Digett you probably have taken a look through our blog posts and wondered why we bother posting technical articles about Drupal. Some people think, “That’s not what a client wants to read.” or “Prospects aren’t interested in all that technobabble.” But as a client—ours or anyone else’s—the technical materials should be important to you too. Here’s why and what you can learn from our example.
I am such a nerd about Drupal modules … I get really excited when I think I need something that does [blank] and then I find a module that does exactly that. I love even more when I find a module that makes some UX or usability problem go away. We have talked about the Drupal 7 contrib modules Digett considers foundational to every project. Today I'm sharing three of my personal favorites that make UX or usability problems go away.
I have come to the conclusion that the Taxonomy Module is not necessary in Drupal 7 for the vast majority of situations. While there is a lot of built-in functionality and a pre-built view for Taxonomy, the module makes too many assumptions about the way content categorization should function. And overriding the pre-built view for taxonomy terms is never as straightforward as I would like. The last few Drupal 7 sites we have built I have not used Taxonomy at all.
It is a common requirement on a marketing website to have a “Featured Content” block on the homepage that displays some random node from a subset of content that has been flagged as featured. There are a number of modules that try to address this type of functionality, but I’m always a fan of using fewer modules — or at least using modules that can be used in many places.
Yesterday my job was to migrate content from an old Drupal 4.7 site into a fresh new installation of Drupal 7. In this post I will outline the basic process for completing that task. This will not be an exhaustive walk-through, but I hope it helps someone else and serves as a reminder a few months from now when I may need to do this again for another client.
When it comes to font sizing on a website, the debate between accessibility and control rages on. The control camp prefers px font-sizes to maintain the look of the site, and the accessibility crowd prefers em to allow font scaling in the browser.
Most Drupal 7 base themes are built using ems but since the em unit is based on the parent elements font-size, dealing with the compounding of ems in nested elements can be a real pain for front-end developers. When building a list it’s likely that you’ll have an <li> nested in another <li>. If you’ve declared the <li> font-size of 1.2em then the inner <li> will be 1.2emX1.2em, and so on an so on. The math can get complicated and frustrating.
Back in June of last year when Google, Bing and Yahoo! introduced Schema.org I wrote about how it would be a game changer for the semantic web. The problem was that it was difficult at best to implement semantic vocabulary on a website, even in Drupal 7. But that has all changed now.
If you want your Drupal 7 site to have a easy user interface with unique effects, you will likely need to add presentational javascript/jQuery to your theme at some point. There are two situations where we might need to add some presentational javascript that each require a different approach:
