planet drupal

Below is the full-size image mockup I made for webchick to highlight the awesomeness of Drupal's (relatively) new stark theme, as seen in Drupal 7. You can download Stark for Drupal 6 as well, but it will be a nice way to quickly expose the underpinnings of Drupal's core HTML output.

(click on the image to view a larger copy)

I'll be working on at least one CSS-only theme for Drupal 7 over the next couple of months, and will hopefully release it to drupal.org by summertime. The transition from 6->7 is going to be awesome for themers!

I just finished rolling a patch for fixing node.tpl.php in Drupal 7 over on the Drupal.org issue queue; hopefully it's ready to be rolled into core, as it's been weeks months since that particular issue was started. Page.tpl.php is already complete. We still have a few more to go, including comment.tpl.php, block.tpl.php and a bunch of little .tpl.php files.

I think Drupal 7 is going to be the best release of Drupal yet, in terms of being able to have a lot of appeal to non-programmers/techies. I set up my first ever full-fledged Wordpress site a few days ago, and it was super-easy to get things going (although also severely limited in what it could do, compared to a base Drupal install with Views and CCK), choose a new theme, change some settings, and hit the ground running.

By making it easier for themers and designers to quickly customize a Drupal site to their liking, and by having some themes included with core that are either (a) beautiful and functional or (b) great for starter themes (like zen, stark, or genesis... all which are great for different reasons), we can grow the Drupal design community exponentially.

We're almost to that point; we just need to keep making patches, keep having meaningful discussions in #drupal (unlike this one) and the issue queues, and keep feeding webchick cookies (and ice cream). Let's make Drupal the best CMS for designers, themers, and everyone in-between!

I recently had a problem with cron on one of my Drupal sites, related to an issue I'll be posting about soon (namely, using Drupal's built-in search with more than 4.5 million entries in the search_index table). When I manually tried running cron, I got a "Cron failed" status message. I checked the log, and it said "Attempting to re-run cron while it is already running."

Apparently, something had messed up (probably due to the fact that I was messing with database tables while cron was working on them) with the previous cron job, and Drupal couldn't start a new cron job anymore. So, with the handy help of Google, I found part of a solution to my cron woes in the Drupal.org forums. Here's what I did to prevent this cron error from happening again:

1. In PHPMyAdmin (you can also do this manually via the command line), delete the following rows from the variable table:
   1. cron_last
   2. cron_semaphore
2. On your Drupal site, clear all the cache tables (If you have Administration menu installed, you can just click the "Flush all caches" link in the site-wide links menu).

As always, make sure you backup your database before you start deleting rows from it!

Now, cron is running without a problem again. There are some other issues I'm still having with cron, though, mostly related to the indexing of content via the built-in search.module. I'm working on fixing this problem, and right now am testing the use of InnoDB instead of MyISAM tables in MySQL to see if indexing goes any faster. (Thanks dmckenna!).

Recently, an article on Accessibility appeared on Planet Drupal which caught my eye, so I clicked on it. When I was taken to the article page on d7ux.org, the banner across the top of the page caught my eye (as it was intended to do!):

Our UX Principles:

1. Make the most frequent tasks easy and less frequent tasks achievable.
2. Design for the 80%.
3. Privilege the content creator.
4. Make the default settings smart.

I think those four principles, especially numbers one and two, should be the driving force behind any web or product design.

Today I contributed my first 'original' piece of content to Drupal: a handbook page entitled Create a CSS-Only Theme. Since the first time I heard about the Stark theme (a Drupal theme which does nothing but expose all the 'stark' html output of Drupal core), I've been thinking of ways to enable designers to quickly build out unique and beautiful themes for Drupal. In Drupal 7, I think this will be a reality. (And maybe, just maybe, I'll create a theme for inclusion with Drupal 7 in the next few months).

Drupalers (myself included) are currently working on fixing the core template files in Drupal so they will provide enough CSS selectors to make web designers happy. We've finished the main template file, which lays out every page on a Drupal site. We're currently working on the 'node' template file, which lays out the main content area of each 'node' in Drupal. By the time Drupal 7 is released, we should have all the main template files fixed to the point where anyone can build a new theme for Drupal without ever seeing a line of PHP.

One area that needs a ton of help, though, is the Drupal 6 Theme Guide in the Drupal.org Handbooks. I've added one page (see the link at the top of this post), but the bigger problem is the disorganized nature of all the pages in the Drupal 6 handbook. I hope that we can get the pages organized in a logical and coherent manner, removing pages when needed, adding others, and rounding out the categories in an easy-to-remember way. Fellow Drupalers: what will you do to help?

There are only two or three Drupal modules that I have installed on every single Drupal site I set up. At the top of this short list is Global Redirect. There are many reasons for its existence, not the least of which is Search Engine Optimization. Global Redirect does such niceties as remove slashes from the end of URLs and makes sure the home page of the site is the standard home page, and not an alias to it (like /front, or /home-page).

Basically, the module is an "SEO-in-a-box" module; sure there are other things you should do to get your Drupal site more optimized, but this module is like the icing on the cake for Drupal. It makes sure that all links to the site will direct to one, and only one link. That way, people copying out a link to a certain page on your site always get the same link, thus boosting your pagerank.

But this module earns kudos from me for more than that reason alone; it goes one further and does something that almost no other Drupal modules do: makes life simple. Download the module, copy it to your server, enable it, and you're done. The default settings are sensible, non-intrusive, and just. work. If only other modules were so nice!

It does only a few things, but it does them <almost> perfectly [see comment by You below], and makes certain aspects of SEO dead simple.

Unless you're doing some special URL re-writing on your site (i.e. more than just using Pathauto and Path), you should have this module installed on your public-facing Drupal sites.

Read more on SEO with Drupal: Search Engine Optimization with Drupal [From Webmaster Tips].