planet drupal

This post is part of our Abridged series, which aims to explain the basics of some of the more ominous yet awesome Drupal projects in simple and practical terms. We hope these posts will help demystify some of these projects for people who have been hesitant to try them out!

While working on our last project I realized that we haven't used breadcrumbs in a theme for a while (well that is not entirely really true, we use them a lot for the admin section). We came across of what we first thought was a bug; the breadcrumbs weren't following the primary links herarchy and were only displaying the "Home" link.

Google here we go, search... search... read... read... read more... and after a lot of trial and error I found the the solution: Custom Breadcrumbs and Menu Breadcrumb.

Now that you have these modules installed and enabled... sorry, what? Not ready yet? Ok, let me know when you're ready... (Meanwhile, Alberto is doing important research) ........................... Huh, what was that? Installation completed? Great, then let's continue.

When we started transitioning into using an Agile development method just over a year ago, one of the first and most constant challenges we ran into was how to make it work for our clients. Agile has been a fantastic tool for defining internal processes that really work for us at Affinity Bridge. Many of our clients, being non-profit organizations and academic institutions, however, are accountable to boards who have to review and approve their budgets ahead of time. They're not able to bill according to work done during agile sprints, without having budgeted for the work ahead of time. Here are a few tips from the lessons we've learned for doing agile development while managing estimates and budgets in a way that works for our clients.

Last week, Zoe, Dave, and I made our way down to San Francisco for DrupalCon. It was a fantastic week, and even though I knew how many people were attending, I was still stunned by the actual size of the crowd, especially when we were all gathered together for the keynote sessions.

A few (well, three - I'm saying three counts as a few) people over at g.d.o asked to try out a module I wrote for a client of ours a few weeks ago. So I'm putting up the first beta of it here.

Behold, the first generation of the MailChimp Import module (Drupal 6 only). This module does no more, and no less, than import your MailChimp campaigns into your Drupal site as nodes. Why would you want to do that, when MailChimp already provides online versions of your newsletters? Because your client asks for it, that's why. Perhaps they want to be able to file their sent newsletters alongside their other content, in the system of taxonomy that suits their particular mental aesthetic. Perhaps they want website visitors to be able to find articles in their old newsletters from the search box in the header of their Drupal site. Perhaps they don't trust that cheerful monkey.

As a follow up to the previous post talking about our (re)branding process, we wanted to share with you some of the details of the new theme for our site, as well as a few configuration changes, and what we learned.

960 Grid-based Theme

In an earlier post, our theme lead Alberto talked a bit about CSS Frameworks, including the 960 Grid System, which is compatible with Drupal's Zen framework. Those are two of the main tools in his theming toolkit, so we made sure to get a theme designed that would comply with using the grid system. Alberto then took the layout CSS file from the 960 Framework and substituted that for the layout CSS file in Zen, but otherwise used all the other Zen files.

This post is part of our Abridged series, which aims to explain the basics of some of the more ominous yet awesome Drupal projects in simple and practical terms. We hope these posts will help demystify some of these projects for people who have been hesitant to try them out!

Here, we'll take a look at the SimpleTest module/framework, including a review of its history within the Drupal project, the current state of the module, how to start using it, resources, and a note on how we've been using it ourselves. HUGE thanks to Drupal SimpleTest co-maintainer Rok Zlender for teaching us about using SimpleTest when he was in Vancouver last summer - the code samples are care of Rok's example custom test.

This post was originally posted on my personal blog, but we thought it was worth sharing here.

This one’s all Drupal folks, cause that’s pretty much all I’ve done for the last two and a half weeks. This is what happened when I asked the question, “Is there some reason we don’t just fix it all?” I did not know then what I was getting myself into…

A small inconsistency

It all started in late summer, when I was testing some Drupal 7 core patches for moving fields and image handling into core, and at some point clicked my way into the Help pages. There was a blatant typo on the Node module help, and then a change in language that needed to be made, so on August 1st, 2009 I created an issue for it.

You may have heard or read comments similar to the following about CSS frameworks:

"They are not flexible enough."
"It's too much useless code."
"I like to keep my CSS clean."
"Why do I need a framework if I know what I'm doing?"
"The site is not going to change, so we don't need a CSS framework."

A CSS framework cannot be expected to be the final solution to all your problems, but it can be a useful tool for structuring and theming your site more efficiently. Read on to learn more about what CSS frameworks are, pros and cons of using them, existing framework options, and related themes.

What exactly is a CSS framework?

Every time you start a new project there are several basic lines of code that you add to your CSS; you may want to remove the default margins added by the browsers, set the font size to 12px as the browser standard, create a popular layout, etc.

A bunch of the Affinity Bridge crew went down to Seattle the weekend before last for the much anticipated Pacific North West Drupal Summit - Mack, Robin, Shiraz, Shawn, and myself (Ariane) made it down (Zoe was meant to come but picked up a cold in Italy and didn't want to contagious it to everyone), and Dave Tarc and Scott Nelson who have been collaborating on a couple projects rounded out the posse. It's always great catching up with the rest of the PNW Drupallers, it really is a hotbed of Drupal activity, and we were lucky enough to be joined by many of our Drupal friends and colleagues who came in from Portland, Idaho, and even Montana.

(Thanks for the sweet photo to Steve Krueger of The Jibe)