Simplest way to develop your custom Drupal theme is to start with some skeleton/wireframe theme.

In this post, I’m briefly reviewing 4 themes (atck, blueprint, framework, and zen), made specifically to serve as theme developer’s starting point. All 4 are listed with their features (as per Drupal project page of each one), with my personal “impressions” (not based on actual use experience, yet). There’s also my choice and order of preference for the 4 candidates at the end.
Read the rest of this entry »

Some things to be aware of when enhancing Drupal site with FLV video playing/conversion features.

• Setup wizard for the free JW FLV Media Player (and the JW FLV Media Player itself)
• Flash Video in Drupal 5: A complete multimedia tutorial to the flashvideo module
• actual flashvideo module page on drupal.org

This post provides several links which would be useful for the beginning Drupal developers, or developers deciding which CMS to use as the base for their next project. Also, strengths of Drupal are highlighted.

Intensively working with Drupal during the past two weeks, I find it to be an excellent tool, and also much more than a YACMS.

Now I think that Drupal is also a framework - providing invisible to developer caching, session handling, access control, theming, localization, and more. The minimal effort required to extend already huge Drupal functionality is to write your own module - and, if done right, your module will immediately benefit from all the bonuses Drupal provides.

But Drupal also really shines as a CMS! You can start with a free design theme, and without any PHP knowledge have your custom portal built within a week - with your own hands, if you desire! (Note: “within a week” is true, but only if you already know what exactly you should be doing; learning time is short, but it’s not within that same week.)

What makes Drupal so powerful? I’d say that beautiful core and numerous modules.

What Drupal has to offer?
Read the rest of this entry »

Is that only me, or WordPress is really leaning towards the Drupal ideology?

Here’s what I mean:

• user levels were changed to user roles - just like in Drupal
• now, instead of categories and just recently introduced tags, the word ‘taxonomy’ is used - which is a Drupal slang
• ‘widgets’ work just like ‘blocks’ in Drupal - even style IDs are assigned the same way, e.g. id=”widget subscribe_to_comments_widget”
• (add here the similarity you found yourself)

I wonder, what will be next. PHPTemplate support, as default theming engine?
Or no-backwards-compatibility policy?
Or, best for WP users, advanced Drupal-like caching and throttling techniques?

drupaldojo.com - at the moment of writing, has 42 video-lessons (screencasts) of developing with Drupal.

Drupal technical introduction
It’s quite old, but as it describes core functionality, it should be still actual.

Please comment if you know of any other good high-quality technical Drupal introductions/descriptions.

This is a collection of links related to the multiple-language content in Drupal CMS.

Drupal i18n report: http://www.developmentseed.org/blog/book/print/376
i18n module
i18n: Getting the whole thing to work : http://drupal.org/node/81094
Patch: Translations of menu titles and descriptions: http://drupal.org/node/70919
Translated links: http://drupal.org/node/67814
i18n: menu not expanding with URL-Alias: http://drupal.org/node/80820

There was an alternative module to i18n, but I cannot find it at the moment.

As I previously mentioned, IBM uses Drupal to build a collaborative web-site, as a conscious choice of a solid CMS. They have a series of articles (Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site) describing in details the processes of considerations and actual implementation. About two weeks ago, a new article was added - Understanding the database layer:

Follow along in this series of articles as the the IBM® Internet Technology Group designs, develops, and deploys an extranet Web site for a fictitious company, International Business Council, using a suite of freely available software. In this installment, explore the Drupal database abstraction layer and learn how to use it effectively while developing a Web site. Discover best practices for module developers and details about using the Drupal database functions. You also learn to implement the necessary code to support a new database — IBM DB2® Express-C.

As you can see, not only the existing code was explored and explained, but also new code for DB2 support was added. Personally, I am not quite even sure what are main applicatios of DB2, but anyway it’s good to have one more option, probably for future extendibility or just more flexibility. There’s a discussion thread at drupal.org, you might want to comment.

Meanwhile, I have troubles installing the new Drupal 5.0 beta-1. I used to install Drupal 4.x without any problems, so I suspect that current 5-beta-1 might be more sensitive to server configuration or just somehow initially misconfigured… Need to see into this issue.

Well, not a news, actually, but this one seems important.

Following the discussions, installation and administrative interface became much simpler, and thus easier for newbies. Other first-impression change is said to be the new default theme, which looks good as well.

I will surely check this new release out very soon, but for now you can try one yourself.

Update: beta-2 is available since November, 28, with over 160 bugs fixed.

Last updated: February 19, 2008.

The newest script version migrates from PHP-Nuke 6.5 to Drupal 5.x.
Download the latest version of the migration script.

In 2002 I set up a PHPNuke-6.0 - based portal. Eventually it died due to the lack of time investments and support from collaborators. Now, when time came to revive the project, I made a search and decided to use Drupal as a base CMS for the portal.
In order to migrate userbase from an old portal to the new Drupal-powered one, and following the topic at drupal.org, I found a script and its modification.
I used it to migrate only users, and made some cosmetic changes:

• added options for custom phpnuke table prefixes
• default user name is now = uname (login), not ‘temp_name’, as before
• I replaced hard-coded links to ‘migrate.php’ with links to $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'], so that if you rename the script you don’t have any problems with that
• now forum topics should not be promoted to the main page (changed 1 to 0 as hinted by Alexis)

Finally, I would like to thank both Karthik Kumar for the original script and Alexis Bellido for the 6.0_to_4.7 modification.
Read the rest of this entry »