Engineered Web

Out of the box, Drupal puts (not verified) next to user information for anonymous users. For example, when an anonymous user submits a comment (not verified) appears next to their name. This is handy for community sites where you need to distinguish between who is a member and who isn't. For sites, like a single user blog, the (not verified) doesn't fit. So, one of the first things I do when a fresh new major release of Drupal comes along is learn how to remove the (not verified). Read more »

The admin area of a Drupal site should be themed differently according to recent usability research. The idea is that an admin or a content editor needs the context that they are doing admin functions, which an admin theme can provide. The concept of having an admin theme is different for many Drupalers. While numerous Drupal shops have been using them for quite some time, a lot of discussion has focused on using the theme for the site in the admin area. Drupal 7 is embracing admin themes by using one and taking the admin area to a whole new level. But, we don't have to wait for Drupal 7 to have a smoking hot admin theme. Let's take a look at 3 good admin themes for Drupal 6. Read more »

MySQL has been my database of choice for a long time. Just about every host supports it and it meets the requirements for just about every project I work on. When I've needed to be in the database to make changes during development I've used numerous programs over the years. Some of those have included phpMyAdmin, DBVisualizer, and the command line. Now that my full time development is on a Mac I've switched to Sequel Pro when I need to work in the database. Read more »

Over the past year the number of good looking freely available Drupal themes has really gone up. Yet, I am still amazed at how many sites are still using Garland as their theme. Especially the personal sites of so many Drupal developers. Don't get me wrong, Garland is a great theme. It's just a very well used theme which means its lost some of it's luster. So on the heels of my post about 5 Hot and Free Drupal 6 Themes, here are 5 more well designed themes for your usage considerations. Read more »

Drupal has long been known as a CMS with few good free themes and even fewer that anyone would call hot. While there have been many great sites built with Drupal the lack of hot free themes has long been discouraging. That is, until recently. Over the past year there has been a boom in hot free Drupal themes so here are 5 of them that recently caught my eye. Read more »

Amy Stephen recently posted on twitter how much Wordpress rocks. My gut reaction wanted me to respond by saying I was less than impressed with Wordpress. Instead I asked a question. How do we go about evaluating a content management system? Amy came to one conclusion and I came to a very different one which means our evaluation criteria must be miles apart. In response to that question, here is my take on how you evaluate a content management system. Read more »

With so many great and award winning content management systems on the market it can be difficult to choose the right one for a project or for a company to use as the basis for its sites. It's a big enough topic that articles have been written and books published on the topic. But, I think there is a more basic decision that needs to be made before the selection can be considered. One that tells you about your plans for using the system.

In the current state of CMS you can't have your cake and eat it, too. That is, you can't have everything you may want out of the box. You need to make a base decision about what you want. Basically, choose two of the following three:

• Flexibility
• Slick UI
• Install and Setup Ease

Let's take a look a couple real world examples using Wordpress and Drupal. Read more »

Comment spam seems inevitable. Every blog, podcast, or site that I've run that allowed comments turned into a place for comment spam. Over the years I've tried numerous methods to kill the spam and most of them either didn't work very well or stole too much of my time to deal with something annoying. After dealing with this problem for several years I now have a setup that manages most comment spam with little work on my part. Read more »

When I was working on a script to preload images with JavaScript one of the decisions I had to make was whether to use document.createElement('img') or an image object to preload the image into. The recommended w3c method is to use document.createElement('img') as it is a consistent way to create elements. This is the method I used. But, I was wondering which performed better. So, I ran some tests and here is what I learned. Read more »

Creating effects on websites using jQuery and other JavaScript has really grown from flashy extras to full on applications in the browser. Part of slick applications is images. They might be part of the content being loaded or something like an icon in an application. But, for those images being added after the page is loaded there can be a time gap while that image is downloaded. To avoid those time delays the images can be preloaded in the background. Lets take a look at how to do that. Read more »