Drupal Planet

As seen at DrupalCon Chicago (in the program book):

I think the IE development and marketing team at Microsoft 'gets' the situation, and is being very creative about it's efforts in promoting IE9 (case in point: IE6 Countdown). As to how far IE9 will ultimately go towards stemming web developers' collective hatred toward Explorer as a platform... that remains to be seen.

The ad above reads:

Dear Web Developer,

We are so very sorry about IE6.

Come have a drink on us at the Opening Night Party. Also, stop by our booth #67 and we will show you why IE9 is way better.

In my own testing of IE9, I've found it to be about on par with FireFox in how much I'd recommend it to users over any other browsers... that is to say, Chrome/Safari is still better, but I no longer need to tell people they should switch—IE9 is good enough for regular Internet users.

The only thing I really, really hope Microsoft starts doing is taking a more Chrome-like approach to adding in little bits of HTML5 and CSS3 goodness (and fixing some bugs) with point releases, rather than waiting 3-5 years for another IE release! (Of course, IE9 isn't released yet...).

What does this have to do with Drupal?

Observing Microsoft's recent inroads in the Drupal community (making sure Drupal runs well on IIS and Windows, and supporting the Drupal community here and there, for instance), I think Microsoft is doing a pretty good job of approaching an open source community with open arms, and changing people's minds (slightly) about their products and offerings.

For example, a couple years ago, there was no way I'd consider hosting a Drupal site on IIS. With Drupal 7 and a good hosting provider/server setup? Definitely.

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.

Today I released my first contributed Drupal module, Gallery Archive (backstory here). I had already created the Drupal theme Airy Blue (in use on this site) some time ago, and have created many modules and themes in use on this site and many other Drupal sites I manage. However, it takes a lot more polish, a lot more work, and a lot more long-term dedication to release a module for public consumption!

So, why would I do such a thing? I'm have little time for such projects as it is... and it's not like releasing a module on drupal.org, thus opening up the issue queue for time-consuming support requests is going to make my life any easier.

Well, I have piggybacked on the success and support of tons of other generous Drupal users over the past two years—I have gone from being a complete programming newbie to a competent (but still learning) PHP programmer, and I have gone from learning what 'node' means to understanding much of Drupal's node API (which, of course, is all changing again ;-). I have joined thousands of charitable souls who devote quite a bit of time—personally and professionally—to making great projects like Drupal stronger... without any compensation besides a 'warm fuzzy feeling.'

I feel it's time I 'pay it forward,' as it were. When I read the book "Hackers," I sympathized with the movement of software developers who wanted to simply create new and amazing things for the betterment of humanity (in my case... humanity and the Church). Continue Reading »