We gave a presentation earlier this week at the Los Angeles Drupal group on Webmin and Drupal, a powerful combination of open-source programs that we use for nearly all of our web projects. The presentation was created in part as a response to a question in the Multisite group about using a web control panel to manage multiple Drupal sites — it’s not exactly the official definition of multisite but it’s still a worthwhile approach to easily managing multiple Drupal installations.

It turns out that the LA Drupal meetup wasn’t recorded, so we’re doing the presentation again at this weekend’s DrupalCamp San Diego (aka SANDcamp) and this time we’re bringing our video camera. Here’s the description of the session, Drupal and Webmin: Managing unlimited Drupal sites with your own VPS:  read more »

Over at the Acquia weblog, Jeff Whatcott is asking for people’s Drupal disaster stories. I asked a handful of people in the office what they would add to the list and before we knew it, we quickly had a decent list of avoidable disasters.

Building websites with Drupal can be like raising an unruly child that only does what it wants to do. We’re fond parents, however, and we love Drupal. Every item in this list is a usability issue, so we’ve posted this to the Top User Experience Improvements in Drupal 7 wiki page with the faith that D7 will play well with others and not bring as many people to tears.  read more »

Drupal is in the midst of a massive refresh, from the ongoing development in Drupal 7 to the iterative design work on the website’s design and IA by Mark Boulton Design. Here at the nest, we’ve been quietly observing during most of it (we’ve been very busy on Digital Dollhouse), but I left a comment on Mark Boulton’s weblog a few months ago that said:

How about making the “r” a faucet that pours a water drop into the “u”? This creates the opportunity to use the same water drop as the main logo.

That idea didn’t really go anywhere but it didn’t go away, either. I posted it to Twitter hoping for some feedback, but as we all know a picture is worth a thousand words. I asked one of our excellent designers to do quick mockup:  read more »

After years of having mediocre Subversion clients to choose from, I was glad when Cornerstone and Versions appeared on the scene. These new challengers have the look and feel of stylish Mac applications and presumably have a lot of new users considering the large vacuum created by developers who have tried and discarded the likes of svnX, SmartSVN and ZigVersion only to go back to the command line.1

I still use the Subversion support built into TextMate, but for me that works best when working with individual files and isn’t great for managing several repositories. For the past few months I’ve been using Versions and when the the public beta expired, I took a closer look at Cornerstone. I liked what I saw.  read more »

1. 1. Ironically, now that there are several excellent Subversion clients to choose from, many developers I know have switched away from Subversion and are using Git and GitX.

Along with hundreds of other Drupalistas, we registered for DrupalCon DC yesterday. It’s sure to be one of the best events of the year and we’re looking forward to it. This will be our second DrupalCon and fourth major Drupal event.

We’ll be in the D.C. area for a few days following DrupalCon. Let us know at the conference or leave a comment below if you’d like to join us for some fun at the Smithsonian (dirt! butterflies! dinosaurs!) and the newly relocated Newseum, an enormous interactive monument created to celebrate the world of news and the free press. It’s too early to tell, but we also hope to go to the annual Kite Flying Festival if it’s scheduled close to the conference.

See you at DrupalCon DC!

Did you know?

• In March, the average temperature in Washington D.C. is 46°F (7.7°C).
• D.C.’s population is predominantly African-American, making it a minority-majority.
• If you want a White House tour, it must be arranged well in advance through your senator or member of congress. If you’re not a U.S. citizen, contact your embassy in D.C.
• Our favorite movies that feature D.C. include Dave, Absolute Power, In the Line of Fire and, of course, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

When describing Boston, many people who’ve lived there for a time have told me things like, "Boston feels like a small town" and "Boston has the rudest, most suicidal drivers I’ve ever seen” and, regardless of whether or not they’re one of those drivers, “Be careful when entering that intersection!"

That’s really just the beginning.  read more »

Webmonkey, once a premiere resource on the nuts and bolts of web development, is back after a 6 year hiatus and I’m pretty excited about it. One reason is partly nostalgic, of course, since this is the place where I learned about web safe colors, made my first favicon and got serious about PHP/MySQL development. Remember, this was back in the days when Apple was charging $30 for a "preview" of what became OS X and tabbed browsing was only possible with the MultiZilla extension for Mozilla.

Ah, fond memories. I think I still have a copy of their HTML character entity cheatsheet somewhere.

Another reason I’m excited is that Webmonkey recently interviewed Acquia’s founders, Dries Buytaert and Jay Batson. Most of what’s discussed, such as Drupal’s history and future and how Acquia was started, has been already been said before but I did find it interesting that in the interview, Jay alludes to how Drupal’s "Community Plumbing" slogan may soon be on its way out:  read more »

Collected some interesting tutorials and articles for those wanting to explore hook_form_alter() and/or theming forms.

In no particular order:

HowTo: Theme a CCK input form
http://drupal.org/node/101092

Modifying Forms in Drupal 5 and 6
http://www.lullabot.com/articles/modifying-forms-5-and-6

Adding extra fields to the product (Ãœbercart)
http://www.ubercart.org/forum/support/3274/adding_extra_fields_product

hide cck labels in input forms
http://groups.drupal.org/node/5119

Drupal - How to Theme CCK Input forms  read more »

This is a simple Firefox extension that redirects the browser to the secure (SSL) version of the user login and edit pages at drupal.org, drupalcon.org, groups.drupal.org and groupsbeta.drupal.org. The thought behind this was that I didn’t want to expose any passwords while using the open wireless network at Drupalcon Boston 2008.

Drupal allows creating posting guidelines for content types but not for comments. Countless weblogs and web columns today have comment posting guidelines and I’ve always been surprised that Drupal doesn’t have built-in support for it.

I’d like to see comment guidelines get into Drupal core but I needed a solution right away and starting writing a custom comment_guidelines module. I was almost done with a first draft of the module when I realized that it was just a whole lot easier to override the comment form using template.php.  read more »