drupal site building

CiviCon 2011 is being held in London just ahead of DrupalCon, so you can take advantage of both great conferences. Whether you're already using CiviCRM or considering it for your organization, you don't want to miss out on this one of a kind event.

At SystemSeed, we have recently started using SASS and Compass to write our CSS stylesheets. For those that don't know, Compass is an open source CSS Authoring Framwork, which together with SASS can really take the chore out of writing CSS. In this article I wanted to talk about some of the things we love about Compass and SASS, and see how some of their advanced features can speed up the process of creating styles that could be used with Skinr.

User registration plays an important part in many websites. However, asking users to go through the registration process in order to gain their account can be a barrier for some, and off putting for others. We already have so many different accounts littered across the internet, do we really need anymore?

That is where services like Open ID and Facebook Connect come in. They let you use your existing user account from one site (say, Facebook) to sign into or create an account on another. So, how do you enable that functionality in your Drupal site?

When working with AJAX, it's a common thing to inject dynamic content into an already loaded page. The idea is that it's possible to allow the user to interact with a page in a way that doesn't constantly require loading a new page like clicking on a normal link does. This is nothing new, people have been doing it for years.

As with most things, there is more than one way to link to a page on the internet. The same goes for linking to content within a Drupal system. You can use absolute URLs, absolute paths, relative paths, node ids, or even special syntax provided by one or another Drupal module. So what should you use, and when?

Consider these three URLs:

This little php snippet has come to the rescue many times throughout my Drupal development days. It lets you use includes and excludes in your Drupal block visibility settings - something that you can not do out of the box.

For example, it would allow you to:

Most forms in drupal can be customised, or 'themed' by writing a few lines of code in your theme's template.php file. However, the comment form is one of a few exceptions where this doesn't work - not with a little extra magic anyway.

As always, there is more than one possible approach, some of them are good, some bad. In this article, we'll be doing it the right way - The Drupal way.

Having just completed building another Drupal media streaming website and I thought I'd take the time to share some of my experiences, especially seeing as two of my most popular articles are about Drupal and media streaming (Drupal 6 video streaming roundup and Drupal 6 media streaming with Dash Media Player). Things however, have come along a fiar bit since I wrote those articles.

Several weeks ago I took a fairly in-depth look at the current video streaming options available for Drupal 6. Shortly after I published the article, a new product entered the market - Dash Media Player. Dash Player is the creation of Travis Tidwell from TMT Digital, also the developer of the FlashVideo module for Drupal.