Engineered Web

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 »

When it comes to good Drupal search the options are limited. There's Drupal core search which isn't anywhere near the search experience we've come to expect. It's a search engine written by CMS developers. On the other hand we hear about Solr. To use Solr you either need to pay a company like Acquia to host it or run Solr as a Java program on a web server. While the Solr module provides all you need to get it going, for most of us this simply isn't an option. For those of us who want more than Drupal core search offers but aren't ready to jump to Solr there's an option in the middle. The Lucene API module. Read more »

Most web developers don't care much for Internet Explorer. When they build out websites and web applications they use Firefox and maybe Safari or Chrome. Internet Explorer is typically only used for testing to make sure everything works. This process can work out well but, what often happens in this process is that Internet Explorer becomes a second class browser citizen. The user experience for someone using Internet Explorer becomes secondary and they often get a weaker experience. Read more »

Stack Overflow has dozens of little features that add little magical touches around the site. They help you find things, they help you display things, and they make using the site fairly intuitive. Let's explore how to add a couple of these features to a Drupal site. Read more »

Stack Overflow brings "group think" to the forefront. Questions and answers are voted on. The more popular a question the better it is. The more popular an answer the more accurate or informative. That's the impression, anyway. And, if you don't know what answer is the best others on the site who know better can help you see what the better questions and answers are.

As we explore building a Stack Overflow clone with Drupal we need to explore how to build this form of "group think" into our site. Read more »

After building out the Question and Answer content types in the first step of creating a Stack Overflow clone with Drupal it's time to create the page that displays the Question, its Answers, and the comments. Ideally this would be done entirely with contrib modules but, there is one missing feature. Luckily it only takes a few lines of code in a custom module to fill that hole for our specific case. Read more »

Since I wrote the post about the style of conversation on Stack Overflow being the next revision for forums I've had numerous people ask how to build it in Drupal. Since there are quite a few features, even with its simple interface, I'll be writing a series of posts outlining how to build the clone. And, for those of you who want the same style but something simpler I'll be writing a post about that as well. The goal of this series of posts is to use contributed modules to build everything. Read more »