Yesterday, we launched Encore Symposiums on the Drupal 6 platform. The group had previously been on a homebrew CMS, and came to Jon and I with hopes of a platform that would allow them to manage every aspect of their site. Drupal fit the bill nicely.

Mint is awesome. I started using it a few days ago, and am very impressed. Having been used to Google Analytics, I wholly embraced the idea of Mint's "instant stats".

Customizing your Drupal user profile page is easier than you'd think. There are really only two steps:

1. Create any custom profile fields
2. Customize the output of the profile page

Well, folks, I finally got around to migrating the blog from WordPress to Drupal, along with a new design to boot.

The new design brings along with it structure changes as well. I've placed more of an emphasis on the main categories I usually write about, and also feature related articles if there are any.

I'd love comments or suggestions on both the new blog information architecture, as well as the design.

Thanks!

Drupal is an excellent content management system. It provides far more than just content management. It provides well thought out and time-tested functionality for user management, security, page caching, and the ability to easily extend your Drupal website with custom code (along with many, many other features). Drupal, however, does not design your website. So, why do most Drupal themes look alike? Great question!

Using 'Primary links' for your Drupal site's main navigation menu is a great idea. However, most themes by default display primary links in such a way that if the menu has sub-child menus, they will not be displayed. Fortunately, the solution is much easier that you'd think.

First off, the way that most themes generate primary links is like so:

As mentioned, this will only output the top-level menu items, like so:

So we have some websites. A lot of websites. About 394 from last count. They're all newspaper sites, they all want blogs, and we want them to be using Drupal for their blog platform. Unfortunately, they're all hosted on a content management system that isn't really meant to be a robust blogging platform. So we had a predicament on our hands. How do we clone 300+ websites into Drupal sites?

There has been a boatload of discussion amongst the Drupal community regarding best practices for managing developement, staging and production environments with a Drupal codebase. The reason this is usually a sore subject for many Drupalers lies in Drupal's heavily database dependent site configuration and management.

So now that I'm dipping into Drupal module development a bit, I ran into some 'roadblocks' that were fairly difficult to discover via default Drupal documentation.

The first thing you should do if you're starting your first Drupal 6 module, is follow along with Drupal.org's Module Development Guide for Drupal 6. That will step you through everything you'll need to know to write your first module.