drupal

We recently had an issue where status messages would 'pile up' and fail to clear until you logged out and back in again. We found different possible causes listed but couldn't work out the root of it until we saw this:

https://drupal.org/node/623028

which led to this:

https://drupal.org/node/635042

Turning off the Admin Menu module wasn't really an option right now, so I ventured onto our Media Temple DV via SSH, did a bit more googling for locations and found this:

my.cnf is located in '/etc'

Use VI to edit my.cnf

Giving a talk to day at Design for Drupal in Boston on web strategy. I wanted to make sure the slides are available so thought I'd repost here.

Just launched a new site for a series of Providence Drupal Meetups that I've been putting together with Chris Murray. I decided that we should use this as an opportunity to show where things are going, so I built it in Drupal 7 alpha 4.

I just spent the past 3 days in San Francisco for DrupalCon, and after such an intense immersion it does warrant some reflection. What better time than 6 hours on a plane, right? John Mayer playing on my iPhone doesn't hurt either. There are many standout memories of the past 72 hours (almost to the minute since I landed in SFO Sunday night), but some stand taller. I've always been a William Gibson fan, and Tim O'Reilly quoted him well in his keynote yesterday:

"The future is here; it's just not evenly distributed."

When I woke up Wednesday morning I was looking forward to an always-fun and interesting meeting day on the newschoolyard.com project, for which I'm the platform architect. We're working on a platform targeted at independent schools to maintain their own web sites, parent and alumni communities, and the whole project is really satisfying. Great challenge, great way to help bring innovation (and huge cost savings) to schools.

Well - had to be done. I needed to get my site updated from Drupal 5 to 6 in order to implement some better features and in general keep up with what I do for clients. It was also useful to go through the upgrade process on an existing site to get used to the pitfalls.

Overall it wasn't all that bad, but I did have to reimagine how I wanted to deal with some views, and recreate some of them from scratch. I haven't had time to really dig into the design, but this had to come first and setting a deadline helped move things forward faster.

Drupal is a quite capable platform, and I've used it quite a lot, both for work and for personal projects. Its Achilles heel though is the admin interface - with ultimate flexibility comes a lot of configuration choices. While the simple solution is to tell the client 'just don't look at that stuff' - it's not ideal, and can be intimidating. Enter some key modules: jstools, form_store and formfilter.

I was a bit annoyed with Drupal when I started working with it about a year ago. Much of the annoyance stemmed from my own inexperience with the platform, but a lingering issue is regarding META tags and Drupal's lack of native support for creating them dynamically. Eventually I found the 'nodewords' module, which does a nice job.

After seeing how much attention my last post on Drupal and accessibility got, and how much time we've been spending with it I realized that we've developed something really worth sharing: a lot of experience with Drupal and accessibility, and a bag of tricks and good practices to go along with it. So I've decided to write more on the topic and hopefully develop a resource for others struggling with the same issues.

I've had to do some research lately on a couple of projects and how well they comply with Section 508 laws. This has gotten to be a really big deal - Target just settled a lawsuit concerning the accessibility of their website for over $6 million. (Good summary here and full details here) That really got some of our clients' attention.