David Herron .com

On my Drupal-based forum site there was a problem - On Internet Explorer the page layout was horribly broken. The content, instead of laying out in a 2 or three column arrangement, had each section of the right/center/left columns one after another. It was as if some of the style sheets simply hadn't loaded. Fortunately you could still use the site meaning missing style sheets didn't interfere with usability except that the site was horrible to look at and probably turned off any Internet Explorer visitors.

It's curious that Drupal 5 Views Recipes is a brand new book, right? Drupal 6 has been available for nearly a year and Drupal 7 is just a few months away, why bother with a book about Drupal 5?

Looking at a colleague's website (organicJar.com) and was jealous over the Feedback button on the side of the page of that website. It's an AJAX'y button at the side, themed so it stands out well over any background content, and plops up a nice form letting visitors give feedback. See the image to the right. It's of course important to get feedback from your visitors, to engage visitors, and perhaps if they have a good experience on your site they'll return again in the future.

For several years I've used a CCK content type named 'Website'. The purpose has been to simply list links to websites for my reference and others benefit. The traffic on my sites shows that the website links (specifically the taxonomy pages listing the website nodes) are popular and in some cases the most popular part of the sites. In general "resources" pages are an old practice on the web, you'd see a "Resources" page on most sites that's a simple list of links to useful sites.

The core Tracker module is a convenient way to look at recent traffic on a Drupal site. It shows a list of recently posted (or modified) nodes along with useful data items for each node. However with Views 2 there is a more flexible way to implement the same functionality, without enabling another module.

The task is really pretty simple. Just download and enable the Views module, then in the Views configuration interface enable the Tracker view. Yup, coming bundled with the Views module is a predefined view which does every task the Tracker module does.

There's a long standing debate over the content of RSS feeds. For the greatest convenience of your readers the full RSS feed is great, because they can read your articles in their feed aggregator. However as a publisher who needs to earn a living from my writing I only want to publish a teaser so that the reader will feel incentivized to visit my site. For me the feed is a lure to bring people to my site, and I cannot do justice to others' viewpiont.

I came to the Drupal community with (to the best of my recollection) Drupal 4.6. That makes me a sort of old timer though really there was a lot of Drupal releases before my time. In the 4.6 days most extension of Drupal meant writing modules whereas you youngsters today don't know how easy you have it with Views and CCK ... What drew me to Drupal was the tagline "Community Plumbing" as I was looking for a platform with which to build online communities or what's now known as social networking. My vision is the use of online community to create positive social change.

Looking at the traffic data google Analytics collects on my web sites I see a high "bounce" rate which means many visitors leave right away. It means they come to the site, then look only at the one page, presumably to go elsewhere. I've been pondering what might be a good way to entice them to stay and look around. After all, my websites exist to instruct people, so the more pages they look at on my sites the more instruction I'm able to impart. Oh, and there's a higher chance they'll click on an ad or something.

Maybe nobody else will find themselves in the situation that's in my hands right now. During the upgrade of this site from Drupal 5 to 6 the book navigation structure got screwed up. Drupal's book content is a tree structured set of pages which are loosely thought of as a "book". It's not really a book, but still the tree structure is a useful arrangement. I've published a lot of pages using the book structure and it was alarming that the structure got lost during the upgrade.

I've upgraded and updated my Drupal installs a zillion times. A strange error has occurred on the last couple of them which has me scratching my head. I want to share some observations in the hope it will help some others..

Upon applying the updates and running update.php I get this error: Fatal error: Call to undefined function: phptemplate_get_ie_styles() in .../themes/garland/maintenance-page.tpl.php on line 23

Twitter is this up and coming social platform which I still don't quite grok the usefulness. However it can draw some traffic to your site and I have managed to learn a few interesting things through twitter. It's growing on me. In any case since there's a lotta twitterers tweeting away it is helpful for website promotion purposes to assist them in any way to tweet about your site.

One of the chores which comes with running a Drupal website is keeping the drupal install and contributed modules up to date. Prior to the Available Updates feature (itself a contributed module in Drupal 5 and core drupal in Drupal 6) this was a manual process. You'd occasionally browse the contributed modules list on drupal.org and hopefully you remember all the installed modules. With the Available Updates feature the system notifies you when your modules are out of date, and it tells you which one. But you still need to do a few things.

What do I mean by "clean" URL's? The URL is of course the string appearing in the browser location bar, and means 'Universal Resource Locator'. Theoretically the URL is used by computer software and maybe it doesn't matter to the user what the URL contents are. However people do share URL's with each other, they read URL's over the phone, write them down on note paper, post them on billboards, etc. For those human uses it is helpful to make URL's useful to humans.

On 7gen.com I am running a podcast about sane uses of technology and am using the RSS Remote Enclosure module to handle creating the podcast feed. A podcast is merely an RSS feed where the items have enclosure tags referencing audio or video files which are the podcast episodes. Out of the box Drupal creates enclosure tags if you upload a file, but the server on which 7gen.com is hosted doesn't have much disk space.

The Blog Theme module allows individual users to select different themes for their personal blog pages. Drupal allows easy switching of themes in that there is a theming layer which is very flexible in making the presentation of a drupal site customizable. This Blog Theme module uses that facility to allow a different theme to be used for blog postings by each user.

The wabi theme is a contributed theme for Drupal. It is recolorable in the style of the Garland theme. It has a few niceties in the look but the layout and look are very reminiscent of Garland.

Contented is one of the better contributed themes for Drupal. This is a re-implementation of the Contented7 theme by Tom Rowan. This is a tableless, multi-column, fluid width layout. Parts of the design are ported from the K2 theme.

Nice things are that it does proper layout and it looks halfway decent. It properly handles switching between 2 and three column layout. The color scheme is an orange remniscient of leaves turning into fall colors.

Customizing contented7 is done by copying custom.example.css naming it custom.css and modifying to your choice.

Introduction

Table of Contents is a new module that adds some really nice new featureitis. You can see it in operation on this here page. It's an exciting new module in that it adds to the navigability of long documents.

Featuritis

The featuritis for this module is to scan page content and find the header tags (H1..H6). It uses the strings in the header tags to create listing of links to those headers. A.k.a. Table of Contents

7:20 Unpacked distribution and moved files into webserver docroot

$ mv drupal-6.0-beta3/* .
$ mv drupal-6.0-beta3/.htaccess .

7:21 Set up database in the control panel

7:22 Connected with web browser to website. I'm taken directly to the Drupal install screen and can choose to install in English or other languages. To install in a different language requires downloading a language pack and unpacking it into the directory. This could be made smoother, I suppose.