Art Williams's Blog

May 9, 2012 by Art Williams

Getting Meta Tags on Views in Drupal 7

Meta elements are an important part of any SEO and even Social Media strategy for a website. Drupal has a number of excellent modules for adding meta tags to nodes, but Views integration is lacking. To add meta tags to a view in Drupal 7 there are two meta tag modules and many hurdles to implementation.

May 2, 2012 by Art Williams

3 Small Modules That Make Good Drupal Websites Great

Identifying the difference between a good website and a great website has everything to do with the care put into the details. Elements the site visitor never consciously notices combine in such a way as to affect them on a deeper level to convey stability, credibility and competency.

April 25, 2012 by Art Williams

A First Look at Drupal Commerce: More Than a Module

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.

April 11, 2012 by Art Williams

Why do we talk about Drupal so much?

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...

April 4, 2012 by Art Williams

RIP Taxonomy Module in Drupal 7

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...

March 28, 2012 by Art Williams

Using Editable Fields for Featured Content Blocks in Drupal 7

Example of editablefields module at work

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.

March 14, 2012 by Art Williams

Migrating content from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 7

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.

March 7, 2012 by Art Williams

Font sizing using rem on Drupal 7 themes

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...

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