I’ve grown to have an affinity for Drupal’s hook_form_alter function. Truly, modifying a form doesn’t have to be as complicated as it may seem. One of the most generic Drupal forms (in my opinion) is the pesky comment form. Out of the box, it comes complete with name, email, homepage, subject, and comment fields.
Mobile is big and getting bigger. Unfortunately, there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach for mobilizing Drupal. Today, a plethora of modules and services exist to help developers create new iterations of traditional site interfaces. We chose Drupal’s Mobile Tools to help us mobilize McMillin Homes and create a custom user experience for their mobile visitors. Here's an overview of our process:
Now that I have been here for more than a month, I have had a solid opportunity to really dive into the inner workings of Drupal. Coming from a background where I worked with object-oriented programming and the MVC design pattern (model, view, controller), it has been a little overwhelming to get a grasp on exactly how Drupal is organized.
I am used to a very clear separation of concerns that the MVC design pattern affords when using popular frameworks such as CodeIgniter and CakePHP. While there is a tool named Movico, which is essentially an MVC approach for structuring a Drupal module, I have yet to fully wrap my brain around how it interacts with Drupal.
Six months ago I wrote a blog post called Cooking up a Homemade Drupal Theme. A visitor recently submitted a comment to my article that's left me contemplating the target audience for that particular post. "Wait," you think—"shouldn't every writer know for whom they are writing before they publish content to a website?" Technically, I agree with this sentiment, but considering the varied interpretations of the skill sets required of a Drupal themer, defining an appropriate Drupal audience can be a real challenge.
Choosing the right tool for a project can sometimes be easy. For example, when driving a nail, the obvious choice would be a hammer, or when splitting some wood, a saw would be the best tool in the box. Sometimes we know the tools we need but don't have them at our disposal, like the time my father-in-law asked me to help him paint a room. What he failed to mention was he only had two small four-inch brushes—not a great choice for such a big project.
