Drupal Planet

There is a situation where one field of a Drupal View needs to pull its content from two fields (aka cck fields) of a node. In my case, they were default author field and a custom field called contributor. This example uses Drupal 7 and Views 3.

I started hearing about this CSS preprocessor stuff a couple of years ago. The concept intrigued me: Use special, supercharged CSS files that could contain variables, functions, "mixins", and other features. After development, these special files would then be compiled into regular CSS files that all web browsers could understand.

To my peril, I stayed away from CSS preprocessors until recently. "Why should I add another layer of complexity to my development workflow?" I thought. "I know what I'm doing with CSS. If it's not broken, don't fix it."

Homebrew is a package manager that makes it easy to install UNIX tools which don't come with OS X. Using the Homebrew package manager provides a great amount of control over the software installed on an OS X system, and it can be used to provide missing elements to run Drupal directly on OS X as a development environment.

I didn't set out to use Homebrew. I simply wanted to use wget instead of curl. I had no idea that would lead me to completely change my development setup.

TinyMCE provides two tools to facilitate cut & paste of text from a Microsoft Word document or web page into a web page with the Drupal content management system.

In TinyMCE 3.4.9, the “Paste from Word” feature will preserve basic Word document formatting while removing special Word-specific code that transparently accompanies a paste from Word which typically messes up the display of a web page.  The “Paste as Plain Text” feature, like Windows Notepad or Mac TextEdit, will strip out all formatting that accompanies content from a Word document or web page.

A technical case study into how we developed the new Planetizen Video Courses platform using Drupal 7 and Brightcove Cloud video hosting to deliver affordable online education to professionals in the urban planning, architecture, and related professions.

Although the CCK3 module had never seen a full release, it was still worth upgrading Drupal 6 sites from CCK2 to CCK3, because the latter added a very compelling tool to CCK's arsenal: Multigroups. This feature allowed users to group several fields together, and enter multiple values into that set of fields as a whole by repeating the field group whenever a new value is added. For instance, let's suppose your node has an event multigroup containing date and location data.

A few months ago I had to develop a Drupal 7 website that was supported by advertising.
After some research I realized that there were no current advertising modules for Drupal 7.
The Advertisement module is the de facto advertisement module for Drupal but a Drupal 7
version wasn't even under development.
So I decided to develop a new contrib module for featuring advertisements on Drupal 7 that was easy-to-use and provided

Integrating Drupal webforms with the popular CRM tool Salesforce is a common request from our clients. The concept works like this: Visitors fill out a contact webform on the Drupal website. That data is then transmitted to Salesforce, where it would be stored as a new record (or "lead" in CRM parlance.)

Normally caching pages for anonymous users is a good thing. There are times however, when a page or two needs to be excluded from the cache. Just such a situation recently occurred while I was working on the website for the Southern California Linux Expo.

As a conference website, there were the usual lists of speakers, sessions and a schedule page listing all the sessions in grid ordered by room and time. With over 100 sessions, that page was expensive to generate and since it didn't change much was a great candidate for page caching.

Slideshow is a popular feature on the front page of many web sites. Drupal makes it quite easy to build one. Here are the steps to build a Views-based slideshow in Drupal 7.