• How to design for Drupal

    12/06/2010

    Lately I have been focusing hard on the optimization of the design implementation process for Drupal sites. 'What should the designer take into account when designing for Drupal?' and 'Is this or that design (element) possible in Drupal?' were the key questions I was trying to get an answer to.

    These are my tips to optimize your designs for Drupal, leading to a faster implementation.

  • Display Suite vs Panels

    17/05/2010

    Ever since the first release of Display Suite, people have been asking if it is a replacement for Panels, and what the differences are between the two. The answer is not an easy one since each module has its own strengths, but there is an overlap too. Without going into a detailed write-up of  the two modules, I will focus on pointing out their main strengths and main differences, so that it might be easier to choose which one you need for your project.

  • How to safely add a stylesheet in phptemplate_preprocess_page()

    16/04/2010

    When you write a custom module, a lot of times you also need to add a stylesheet. The safest place to do this, is in your implementation of hook_init(). But sometimes, you have to wait until your phptemplate_preprocess_page() kicks in before deciding what stylesheets to add. In that case, there a few things you should take into account, otherwise you might overwrite the stylesheet changes done by other modules.

  • An introduction to Display Suite

    14/04/2010

    Drupal is a great framework when it comes to managing a large variety of data. The contributed module CCK makes it easy to define how you want to organize that data in content types,  and with Views you have a powerful tool to query that data and make all kinds of lists.

    But despite the elaborate theme layer with numerous theme functions and template files, there is no decent way to handle the display of your data. Enter the Display Suite. This post is a short introduction for the module that will totally change the way we theme in Drupal.

  • One list to rule them all

    08/04/2010

    A Drupal site typically comes with several content lists e.g. a list of news teasers, a list of 'related items' in the sidebar etc. With a few simple steps, we can make sure all of them have the same HTML output, giving the advantage of clean and reusable css.