Drupal Multisite Install with cPanel

I recently did some work for a client setting up a multisite install on a shared hosting account using cPanel. With shared hosting, if you run into any problems you're pretty much on your own. And unfortunately for me, there were problems. Since I'm always looking for an opportunity to turns lemons into lemonade, I thought I'd write a 'how to' post to save others a bit of aggravation.  

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An Interview with Jurriaan Roelofs

I recently had a chance to discuss responsive web design with a Drupal developer at the vanguard of this emerging standard, Jurriaan Roelofs.

Jurriaan, based in Utrecht, Netherlands, is the author of the responsive base theme Arctica and its companion theme extender Tundra. 

Here's Jurriaan on responsive theme design, the challenges facing Drupal and what he thinks the future has in store.

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The Marketing of Drupal

In his keynote address at DrupalCon 2011 in London, Dries Buytaert made the case that WordPress is not a Drupal competitor. It's a point he first made on his blog in April of that year writing, "While there are things we can learn from WordPress, it is not the competition."

Instead, Buytaert has implored the Drupal community to focus on two other areas. First, he has promoted outreach to the large percentage of websites that currently do not use a content management system at all. Secondly, he has encouraged the Drupal community to learn about the commercial CMS alternatives and help large companies using those systems move to Drupal.

Buytaert makes some interesting points, but is he right that WordPress is not a competitor to Drupal? I don't think so.

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Drupal Themes Get Responsive

Over the past six months, responsive web design has gone from being a hot trend to an emerging standard. Not to be left behind, Drupal theme developers have begun to produce some excellent responsive themes. Here's what you need to know.

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Have a Need for Speed?

I returned from a long vacation over the holidays to discover that one of the sites that I manage had developed some serious performance issues. Page load times had gone from 1 or 2 seconds to more than 8 seconds on some of the slowest loading pages.

After messing around with a few of the usual suspects, I decided to give the Drupal Boost module a try in hopes that it would speed up the site while I worked on tracking down the underlying issue.

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Understanding Omega Theme

One of the themes for Drupal 7 that has caught a lot of people's attention is Jake Strawn's Omega theme. Omega incorporates a number of features that are unique among Drupal themes and that can provide site builders with some cutting edge tools for building the next generation of websites.

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How to Add Stylesheets to Your Theme

Adding stylesheets to a web page is one of the first things a designer or developer learns how to do, but adding a stylesheet the "Drupal way" calls for a different approach. In my rush to finish the custom theme for my first Drupal site, I skipped the documentation on adding CSS and simply placed a link to the stylesheet in the page.tpl.php template file. 

It's a little embarrassing to admit this mistake now, but it wasn't such a bad guess, really. After all, adding styles to a template file is the preferred method in other flavors of web development. But by adding my CSS in this way, I bypassed Drupal's stylesheet aggregation and compression, and in doing so, lost a nice little performance boost. 

Now that you know how you shouldn't add your styles, here are three ways to correctly add them to your Drupal theme.

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Module Review: Webform

The Drupal Webform module is a great tool for creating a variety of online forms, particularly surveys. And although it has a lot of very useful features, this module isn't going to be the answer to all of your Drupal survey building prayers. In this post I'll walk through the features available in Webform as well as look at some of its limitations.

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Module Review: Drupal Workbench

One common concern for Drupal sites with multiple content contributors is how to deal with editorial workflow. My organization faced this issue when migrating to Drupal a few years ago and after reviewing the options, I implemented a workflow using the Rules module. This has worked fairly well, but it has always seemed like an inelegant, convoluted solution.

We recently began to consider migrating our sites to Drupal 7, so I took the opportunity to refresh my research on the subject. It was at this point that I discovered Workbench.

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