How To: Leverage Drupal Taxonomy
While trying to think of what to write, regarding Drupal taxonomy, it was my kids’ story
last night that inspired this posting about this video covering how the taxonomy module works and what it means to your Drupal site.
How To: Drupal SEO using Nodewords for Meta tags
SEO is one of the more critical aspects for any web site - at least if you want to be found in the search engines. The fact that Drupal is capable of being super SEO friendly is a great benefit. However, it doesn't do you much good to simply know that Drupal is SEO friendly. With modules like SEO Checklist from Volacci you can certainly walk through the myriad of possible SEO options.
How To: Drupal debugging with Devel
Getting started as a Drupal developer can take quite a bit of time. One of the key tricks is to know what to look for, and more importantly, how to look for it.
How To: Embedding media using SWF Tools module
Yep, we're living in a media rich world (just in case you didn't notice the video on this web page <wink>). In fact, what's the second most popular search engine? Is it Bing? Nope, it's YouTube of all things (last I heard).
So, all you really need to know, is how to bring your Drupal site up to the media rich standards of the new web and activate some media modules. Personally, I've used a number of them, and I'm quite comfortable digging around with Javascript and jQuery, however, there's something to be said for the easy route.
How To: Using Drupal Webform for useful feedback
The Drupal Webform module is both a popular and useful module for collecting information from web site visitors.
For the most part, you can install, activate and start to create your own webforms right away. The module is pretty easy to use, well crafted and created by one of my most favorite Drupal developers.
Using webform is great when collecting valuable information, but what happens when you need a bit more. Is it possible to know where a site visitor was when they clicked on a response form? Can you determine what browser they are using, and if they use Macintosh or Windows? You sure can, and it's VERY helpful! Take a few minutes to watch this video and start collecting even more useful information.
How To: Drupal Panels
Like many other content management systems, Drupal is built on PHP. With PHP, you can dig in and make it do whatever you want. Likewise, you can dig into Drupal and make it do most everything you want - well, almost. If you're not afraid of writing PHP code, then the sky's the limit. If you're limited by the time and desire to learn PHP, then Panels is likely the way to go!
How To: Create a Drupal Calendar
In the beginning was the Event module. It was the de facto standard for managing calendar types of data. That was before CCK. Content Construction Kit saw fit to bring about many changes in the world of Drupal.
With the rise of Views module, a new era was born. Shortly after, the super talented developer KarenS created Date module and Views and Date got together. Their offspring was the Drupal Calendar module.
And from that time on, a Drupal calendar was easily possible with date and time harmony spreading across the land.
Preview: Open Atrium
I recently received a direct tweet from the folks at Development Seed with notice about the beta release of Open Atrium. Having been quite interested in seeing what they've got, I quickly downloaded a copy and got it up and running.
I decided to record the process and provide my first impressions. Bear in mind, these are first impressions and I'm not an expert (by any means) about their system. I dug into the system as a developer and skimmed through it.
If you're interested in finding out more about the actual feature set, they've got a video on this page.
Feel free to leave related comments below.
How To: Finding Drupal Modules
Maybe your experience was similar. You learned about Drupal, you thought it was great (still is) and you wanted to make it do more.
Of course, you knew about adding modules. There's a whole section on Drupal.org. You visit the site and WOW! Get ready to surf through over 4,000 modules. You'd have to spend enough time with at least 10-a-day to know what each one does.
Discovering if a) there's a module that does what you want, and b) if its name may transalte into the feature you seek (try to guess what Eldorado Superfly does without reading the description), can be an exercise in exploratory determination - determined to keep exploring that is.
How To: Add focused Drupal search to your site
When it comes to search, Drupal seems to do OK by itself. However, there are a number of supporting modules which will make your Drupal's default search even better. These include Porter-Stemmer (english only), Search 404, Search by Page, Similar By Terms and many others.
If you're seekign to help an advanced user out, then modules like Search config can help with that. But what about the user who won't dare go into the hidden area of 'Advanced Search'? This is where the power is - right?
It sure is. This is where you tell Drupal what content types and categories you want to limit the search to. This is where a user, simply looking for a job on your site, which lists information about jobs, news, blogs and other items, can focus their results.
So, why don't you stop expecting the user to figure this out, and just make it happen for them! That's what this video is all about. Using the default Drupal search box and forcing it to focus on specific content types or categories. You control what Drupal searches for and you control where it shows up!