Drupal 6

Drupal 7 launched just over a week ago, and earlier this week I moved this site over to Drupal 7.

Although there are some critical, major and minor bugs to fix on Drupal 7, it's time to start talking about Drupal 8.

For the last 6 months I have been working on Drippic, I have blogged and tweeted about it many times. Although if you still don’t know what it is, it’s a Twitter image service, much like Twitpic, yFrog, Tweet photo etc, but Open Source and built on Drupal.

Users can upload images via:
Custom API (build to match Twitpic)
Twitter for iPhone (by entering custom image service)
Twitteriffic for iPhone (by entering custom image service)
Spaz for Palm WebOS (default image service)
Email (custom address generated on My Account page)

Media queries are getting more and more popular in web design to allow your web site to change depending on the screen resolution, or screen orientation.

It is very simple to add media queries to your Drupal theme.

To define a CSS file in your Drupal theme's info file you would usually write declarations such as

stylesheets[all][] = style.css

or

stylesheets[screen][] = style.css

etc.

To use media queries you can write declarations such as

stylesheets[screen and (max-width: 600px)][] = screen-600.css

or

There has been a lot of press regarding how many Drupal jobs are currently available. Many people have been commenting on the lack of experienced Drupal developers. Well, I am here to help.

As many people maybe aware I work full time for Mark Boulton Design, as a key member of their development team. Although in my spare time I have around 10 hours a week to take on freelance projects.

Yesterday Twitter announced their Anywhere API (http://dev.twitter.com/anywhere/begin). So I quickly added it to a custom module.

Here's how...

function module_name_init(){
drupal_set_html_head('');
$js = "twttr.anywhere(function(twitter) {";
$js .= "twitter.hovercards();";
$js .= "twitter.linkifyUsers();";
$js .= "});";
drupal_add_js($js, 'inline');
}


Last week I had the crazy idea that I could build my own version of Twitpic with Drupal. It turns out that I can.

In under 300 lines of code I wrote the Drippic module that allows posting of photos from Tweetie for iPhone.

Here’s what is does:-
Allow posting of photos (and a tweet) via a post request.
Photos saved as an ImageField and tweets saved as the title of a node.
Allow commenting on photos, posting the comment back to Twitter.
User generated, and verified with Twitter when posting a photo or comment.
Short URLs created using the Shorten module.

We've just launched the new Mark Boulton Design studio site using Drupal.

http://www.markboultondesign.com

One of the great things about Drupal is that you can run more that one site off one installation. This saves disk space and load on your server, it also saves maintenance time. With only one installation to manage and update the time spent administering your site drops greatly.

So, how do you setup a multi-site? well, it’s very easy.

1. Firstly install Drupal as you would normally. Download it into your web root, copy the settings.php file, add a files directory, setup a database. etc. The domain name for this site for example would be http://www.example.com.

As mentioned in previous posts I am writing a Drupal book. I can officially announce the book will be entitled “Professional Drupal Module development”, it will be published by Wrox Press, who are a brand of Wiley, the book will fall into their Professional series.

With this book Butcher has touched upon a great topic for the Drupal community, and the great thing I found when starting to read the book is not much JavaScript knowledge is needed. When reading the book I quickly scanned Chapter 1: Drupal and JavaScript and Chapter 2: Working with JavaScript in Drupal. The first chapter gives a good overview of coding languages used, Drupal and Javascript, the second gives a good overview of how Drupal can use JavaScript within a theme, and how the theming system works.