Drupal

Theming Drupal forms can be tricky because the form API provides so much flexibility it's sort of overwhelming for a designer or themer. Pretty much there are three approaches to theming forms: CSS, theme level, or module.

Drupal 7 has been out for a bit and I have done a handful of ports of themes from 6 to 7 and rather than go through the in depth list of items to do on Converting 6.x themes to 7.x each time, for quick ports you can follow the list below.

Drupal breadcrumbs are a pain. By default they aren't the usable breadcrumb navigation that people find helpful. On CCK node types they don't show any kind of site hierarchy; in fact by default they only show a link to the home page. The only place the breadcrumbs are helpful are on administrative pages.

So I was recently working on a project and there was a requirement to have anonymous users view a simple homepage with a sign up form. This is easy enough, create a page (/node/add/page) and add the sign up form (See below, quick and dirty), and set the default front page to this newly created node on /admin/settings/site-information.

Depending on your website the search box might be a crucial element of your site. Ultimately having a functional and aesthetically pleasing search section is helpful to your end users. Drupal's built-in search module is a good starting point but if you have lots of nodes your site performance might take a hit.

I just gave a presentation at DrupalCamp LA 2010 about creating a custom theme. I wanted to post links to some resources.

Dealing with web typography can be a disaster. Finding a font that fits the site, setting the font-family CSS property (and "fallback option/s"), then testing the rendering in different browsers.

I have done some SEO work with a handful of different Drupal sites and I find myself installing the same modules over and over again so I thought I would share my recipe with other Drupalistas. There are a lot of other SEO modules available (Some which I use) but the ones listed below are pretty much used on every site I manage.

I have written about upgrading Drupal modules, but at that time I was working on only a handful of Drupal sites. Now, I'm working on quite a few Drupal sites. So manually upgrading modules was becoming a bigger pain and I needed a way to automate the upgrade process.

Drupal 7 is maturing and should have an official release before the end of this year. Once there is an official release support for Drupal 5 will stop. So if you have a Drupal 5 site and haven't upgraded now is the time to do it.