Archive for the ‘Drupal’ Category
Mar
04
2012
at 7:59pm
If you’ve attempted to add color module support to your Drupal theme, you’ve probably found the methods to be confusing, to say the least. I don’t understand this well enough to write a full tutorial, but I can offer a few tips:
- There are two main tasks in implementing the Color module: getting the preview in the theme settings to work and then getting those colours to apply on the actual site. Implementation instructions tend not to differentiate between the two, which adds to the confusion.
- You must have colour options called “text” and “links”. (see issue #693504 for some background on this). That issue seems to indicate that “base” is required as well but I haven’t found that to be the case. This means that you must have at least two optional colours in your theme (and probably three if you want to do more than just text and links!).
- There are two methods for implementing the preview in the theme settings. One is the (incredibly confusing) sliced image method described in the Drupal.org documentation, and used in the Garland theme. The other uses a rough html/css mock-up instead of images, as demonstrated in Bartik. I chose the latter.
- If you don’t want to use the gradient option in your theme, you have to leave the array empty in your color.inc, otherwise you get PHP errors. Just like this:
'gradients' => array(),
- If you’re getting PHP errors about an “Undefined index”, it may be because of either point 2 or point 4, above.
I have found the Adding color module support to your theme in Drupal 7 tutorial by James Tombs to be particularly helpful. It describes the html/css method implemented in Bartik.
Posted in Drupal | No Comments »
Jun
17
2010
at 9:58am
If you’re like me, you may find the default content, comment, and admin pages in Drupal to be somewhat inadequate. For example, the default content admin page (for nodes) does not allow you to filter by author name, keywords in the title, taxonomy, or publish date. The comments page does not have filtering options at all. The users page does not allow you to search for a user name or join date (you can search for users using Drupal search, but this does not allow you to perform bulk operations on them).
I have created some views to replicate these pages with more filtering options. View Bulk Operations does come with a sample view for content, but I found that this view didn’t contain the options I wanted. Each view comes with two pages: one to replace the default admin pages (admin/content/node, admin/content/comment, and admin/user/user) and one for a tabbed interface of all three views. It would be nice if these could be the same page but you can’t have more than one URL for a page. Read more…
Posted in Drupal, Usability | No Comments »
Apr
02
2010
at 1:49pm
Back in September I wrote about an agreement by the University of Waterloo to use the Open Text Web Content Management system. Well, as it turns out, that decision was “revisited” in February and UW will be using Drupal as it’s official web content management system.
I have been on maternity leave since October so I’m not entirely sure of the reasons for this decision. I know that some people went for training on the Open Text system in November and found it to be very cumbersome and difficult to use (something I thought was evident from the beginning, to be honest!). I think there were some other issues as well but I don’t know too much.
Needless to say, I am thrilled! There is a tiny bit more information on the Kitchener Waterloo Drupal User’s Group, as well as in the UW Daily Bulletin.
Posted in Drupal, Open Source | 1 Comment »
Sep
08
2009
at 8:04pm
Well, actually, we didn’t really “choose” anything. Something was chosen for us in the form of a “donation” from OpenText of their web content management products to the university. I co-chaired the committee that was charged with investigating content management systems in the fall and winter 2008/2009. This “donation” was arranged completely outside of our committee. In fact, we didn’t even know it was happening until the deal was essentially done.
I did do my best to sell the benefits of Drupal to the committee, and to explain why the OpenText product (formerly called RedDot) was not a good solution (phrasing it politely). However, I’m not sure that, given the chance, “we” would have chosen Drupal anyway. Why? Here’s a few of the biggest objections given by others in the group:
- Sever models – the other two systems under consideration used a “push” model where static pages would be published to outlying web servers. This was considered to be preferable to a centralized model where pages are served by a database. Why? Mainly because many units within the university really want to run their own web servers. They also liked that the main system was “behind the firewall” and therefore more secure. This issue was focused on by some people to the exclusion of any other factors (usability? functionality? extensibility? who cares?). A few people actually said that since these two systems used the same publishing model then they were “really the same”.
- “It’s not enterprise” - I’m not sure what this is actually supposed to mean but it was a big problem for some people (and I’ve heard this in other higher ed circles as well). Maybe if it had a sticker price of half a million dollars and obscenely complicated server requirements, then it would be “enterprise”??
- Security – there are still many people out there who believe that open source must be insecure because it’s developed by “some guy in his basement.”
There might have been other issues, had we ever gotten around to actually testing Drupal against the other two systems. Drupal isn’t exactly known for its usability, but from what I saw from the others Drupal isn’t any worse and might actually be better. To be honest, our presentation from Acquia didn’t do a lot to make the benefits of Drupal more clear.
Update 04/02/2011: As is turns out we did choose drupal.
Posted in Drupal, Open Source | 5 Comments »
