drupal

I used to work in the Archdiocese of St. Louis as the director of Web Development, so archstl.org (and other online Archdiocesan properties) are near and dear to my heart. I spent countless hours merging some 49 Joomla websites into the Drupal install that (still) runs archstl.org, and besides a bunch of database heavy lifting that was outsourced, I bled over almost every feature on the site (I've chronicled many experiences on this site in the past).

So, I'm very happy to see that the Archdiocese has continued to develop and improve the site. This new design has a more modern and 'edgy' feel, and is the first redesign to involve more theming and work on the 'View' of the website rather than a complete rearchitecting of the database, filesystem, etc.—which is awesome!

I wish other Catholic organizations I've worked with were in the position of not having to scrap their website and redesign from scratch every few years... I've seen too many projects where an organization will spend thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, and end up with a site that's not very future-proof, and will again be scrapped and redesigned for much more $$$ in a few years. Don't be that organization :)

About a year-and-a-half after releasing my first contributed theme for Drupal, Airy Blue, I have finished and release my second contributed theme, MM - A Minimalist Theme.

MM is my first HTML5 theme, and my first for Drupal 7 (which, by the way, is awesome!). I have been working on refreshing my LLC website, Midwestern Mac, for the past few months since I scrapped my first hacked-together theme from about 2.5 years ago, and I finally decided to take the plunge and go Drupal 7 for the redesign.

MM is based on Boron, an HTML5 base theme that is still in beta for Drupal 7 (thus, I can't have a final release of my subtheme until Boron is final as well).

The theme has a few nice features:

• No images whatsoever (cuts down on page load times, since there are less resources to load).
• HTML5 markup (tested in IE7-9, FF 3+, Safari 4+, Chrome)
• Progressive enhancement - we're using box-shadow, border radius, and some other CSS3 elements that only work in newer browsers at this point.

I figured I'd like to help get more themes on the docket for Drupal 7's release—right now there are very few, and I think it would be nice if people downloading D7 and wanting to tinker could have more than two or three themes to play with.

Plus, it's just a nice thing to do for an open source project that has given me a career.

In my always-continuing quest to find the perfect online calendar display/management solution, I have found the next level of calendar display/management bliss.

Previously, I was pinning all my hopes on Drupal's very robust, but often complex and confusing, Calendar.module (in use by almost 50,000 websites—and for good reason—it's extremely adaptable). The module provides many different displays, and gives you the ability to link directly to a specific day/month/week... but it (a) is relatively slow to allow switching from month to month, (b) requires a rather complex view, with arguments, which can be confusing for first-time users, and (c) it takes patience to theme it well.

I love the Calendar module, and I still use it on a few sites where necessary, but I've found a new contender that has nothing to do but improve; that condender is the FullCalendar module, which is based on the great fullcalendar.js jQuery-based calendar library by Adam Shaw.

This is IE. It's easy enough, though, to add better styling to a fullcalendar.

FullCalendar is simply a views display that takes a list of event nodes (as long as your node has a date/time attached, it will work), and displays them in a beautiful calendar display that works across all modern browsers, and even most mobile browsers (I've tested Android, iOS 4, FF, Chrome, Safari, and IE so far).

I had a little trouble getting the calendar to display in IE6/7, but I supplied a quick patch to fix that issue.

One thing I have yet to test is the performance of fullcalendar when displaying large batches of calendar items (in this case, calendar.module might be better—if you need to show thousands of events on a calendar from many years prior). The biggest calendar I have right now displays about 200 items. As time goes on, I could either simply let the list build to the point where fullcalendar slows a bit, or limit the date range so events from only the past few months show.

Many of my favorite websites offer a nice little feature, immediately following the body of the page, that highlights 3-5 "possibly related" stories or blog posts. I wanted to do this on OSC and some other sites, but found that it's difficult to add regions inside of nodes—the closest I could get with the default theme/block behavior is to have it appear after comment section, which is too far down the page to be relevant.

I decided to use the Featured Content module to create my blocks, as it offers a good amount of customization as to what kind of algorithms it uses to find related nodes... performance considerations aside. There are other ways to go about creating lists of related nodes, but this was quick and easy.

Adapting a solution I found here, I created a simple function inside my template.php file that allowed me to print a block from inside my node.tpl.php template.

Inside template.php:

Inside node.tpl.php:

I chose to rank related nodes first by similar taxonomy terms, then by how many views the node received (I'm using the statistics module on this site).

Alternatively, you could do one of the following to accomplish the same kind of thing:

• Set up a region inside your nodes, in the node.tpl.php file. This seems to be a little burdensome, though, unless you're planning on doing many different things inside said region(s).
• Use the Panels module to add blocks inside of nodes, or in a different kind of page layout.

Since the beginning of this website, we've had a Twitter page that shows all tweets from Open Source Catholic members who choose to allow OSC to show their tweets.

In the past, we used a simple authentication system that worked great before Twitter switched to using OAuth only... after dragging our feet for a while, we finally took the time to get OAuth and Twitter working correctly on this site again.

This means that you can add your twitter account to your OSC account, by simply visiting your 'My account' page, clicking 'Edit,' then clicking on 'Twitter accounts.' Click the 'Add account' button to add your Twitter account, and voila! Your tweets will start showing up in the global Twitter page.

Also, you can choose to post any blog entry on this site to the @oscatholic Twitter account if you so choose—use this feature with discretion, though, as it's liable to be taken away if it's abused!

You can also authenticate to this site using Twitter, although that feature is in beta for now.