Ivan Soto

In January I started in a full-time position at Incite Marketing as a Web Developer. Incite is a local marketing firm with more than 10 years in the field and while my job involves working with a CMS, I had to switch to Expression Engine so I won't be doing much work in Drupal, hence you won't see me posting about it too often. The reason is because I'm spending my extra time working on my Android projects.

As I posted before, I started building an Android app for reading comics. It still doesn't have a name but so far it's working pretty well with reading manga from OneManga.com. Although, thats no the only way to get comics, I also plan on giving the ability to read from ZIP, RAR and CBR files.

Another one of my projects is my Drupal administration theme Cleanr. So far is doing well, with over 130 sites reporting they are using it.

I'm also getting a Nexus One in the next couple of days, so with having an HTC Magic and a Nexus One I will be making my Android apps to work better on both devices. I will be posting pictures of my phone soon. 

 

The old blog in Wordpress is now gone and I will be using Drupal from now on for my blog. The main reason of this is because I work with Drupal, it's also more flexible and overall I feel more comfortable working on it.

So far, besides the change on the platform there are not so many changes, but let's list them:

Design

Even cleaner, brighter and more attractive. I like to keep it simple, I love blue tones and my personal blog is the perfect excuse to use them.

The Work section also sports some nice selectors and some jQuery AJAX godness.

We all know Drupal has some usability problems (or a lot). It's not friendly when you first install it and adding modules and themes can be confusing at the beginning. But wait! Adding stuff to Drupal is so easy, just download the zip file upload to the server and enable the module/theme. And here is exactly when we start having problems. At one side, going module shopping is easy and repetitive fun but on the other side we often forget that downloading 20 extra modules can make our site run slow and even make it crash. Not to mention that some modules are not meant to be compatible with others. And first of all, don't be scared of buying a book that teaches you how to administrate Drupal, it's definitely worth if you are going to be in charge of the content.

Plan your site before start building it

Even though this is important for any kind of project, because of Drupal ease of installation and setup users tend to "try" modules and forget that little tab called "Uninstall". Even so, some modules won't completely uninstall or can just break other parts. Not all modules are perfectly made.

Today I was working on a new site when I realized that the top navigation had descriptions under the links. I asked myself for a few seconds, how can I do that on Drupal? If you don't know what I'm talking about, have a look at this screenshot of another site. I'm doing this on a theme, so no need for a module here. What I need to do here is override (the "Drupal way") the theme_links function and that's very easy on a theme, we just need to go to /includes/theme.inc and copy the theme_links() function. Then we can just paste it on our template.php file but we change the function name from theme_links to MYTHEMENAME_links.

One of the most complicated things to understand when templating or developing modules for drupal is the theme() function. But when you know how to deal with it is really useful even when there's no way to know how many we have available. The way to use it fairly simple, let's see how the Garland theme builds the primary links:

print theme('links', $primary_links,
array('class' => 'links primary-links'));

The first argument is the actual hook we are calling, the second and third are the the arguments we are passing to that functions. So basically the theme function will output plain HTML and it's actually way cleaner than defining a function or coding a lot of php on our template.

Protecting your site from hotlinks can be really useful to prevent other sites stealing bandwidth, but it's also comes handy when you want to protect files from private areas. The first 2 lines are responsible from redirecting all the traffic from www.yoursite.com to yoursite.com and the third and fourth line is for preventing hotlinks, in this case PDFs and SVGs.

People who's used to set up multiple web software in PHP and MySQL like forums, blogs, cms, etc. often don't check what are the requirements or instructions for setting up a site. Here is a list of what I get done right after installing a site in Drupal.

Cron - A Drupal site without crontab correctly set up can still work, and in most cases it will since you don't have any module depending on Cron to work. But if you use a module like Simplenews (for email newsletters) it will definitely need cron. Regardless of what module needs it, it's highly recommended to set up Cron. You can find more information on how to set up cron on the Drupal handbook.

Remove TXT files from root - It's never good to show the world which Drupal version are you running, that's why removing .txt files from the root will hide it. Actually you need to remove all txt files but robots.txt

Remove unused themes - I Drupal 5 I usually remove all folders under /themes but /themes/engines. In Drupal 6 I leave /themes/engines and /themes/garland since it's used for the update page.

I've always been one of those few persons who defend Windows Vista saying that it does have a bunch of very cool features and improvement over Windows XP. Even when you lose performance in general with Vista, new users will like it since it feels more secure and easy to use. Since the website launched (when I was a Windows user) I've been reading Paul Thurrott's winsupersite.com looking for reviews and news from mostly Windows products (I don't really care about the rest in the site).

Maybe you will be interested in reading Building a web application layout 1 if you need to know how did I setup the xhtml and basic CSS. In this part we will try to acomplish two things: Insert a javascript dropdown menu and apply the design I did just to this application.

In a way to build an entire layout for a web application we need to know what exactly we need. In this case I'm going to use a 90% width with a top menu, left menu and a right handed help box used to explain what the current section does. It's always useful to draw a mockup of the layout we want to achieve. Since this is a kind of simple layout we don't really need it, but I still did it.