Skip to main content
Friendly Machine | Drupal Website Management
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact

An Interview with Jurriaan Roelofs

Drupal interview series

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.

Read full post

Hey Drupal, You Forgot Something

Include a default WYSIWYG editor in Drupal, please.

The most basic function of a content management system is the ability to create a page. However, this fundamental activity of website building is often an unexpected hassle for new Drupal users. Yeah, I'm talking about the lack of a built-in rich text editor.

I know there are some strong feelings in the Drupal community about this, but let me try to persuade you that whatever the philosophical or technical reasons for not including a default editor, they're hurting adoption of Drupal and needlessly creating a usability issue for those who are evaluating the platform.

Read full post

The Marketing of Drupal

Marketing 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.

Read full post

Drupal for Mobile

Drupal mobile websites

Is Drupal really a viable option for a mobile website? As the percentage of mobile users skyrockets, it's a question a lot of people have started asking. With all the conflicting recommendations and buzzwords flying about, it's easy to see why some aren't quite sure. Let's cut through the noise and look at where things really stand.

Read full post

Drupal Themes Get Responsive

Drupal responsive theme

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.

Read full post

Social Media Marketing Tips & Mistakes

Social media strategy

This post is by guest author Priti Pandya of iNetZeal.

We all are fans of at least some celebrities or successful business people. We look up to them, and probably, along with admiration, even adulate them. But what if we turn into celebrities ourselves and people begin to follow us? How will we deal with the sudden attention when we have our own business to hold on our shoulders?

Well, here are some tips on how to use Social Media Marketing as a tool to enhance your business and some mistakes that you mustn't risk making!

Read full post

Have a Need for Speed?

Drupal Boost Review

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.

Read full post

MailChimp Now Integrates with Drupal 7

Drupal 7 Mailchimp Module

It was announced this year that the MailChimp module has been upgraded and that it has developed complete integration with Drupal 7. This means that MailChimp’s full functionality is accessible within the Drupal user interface. This is a fundamental change and a complete rewrite of the Drupal 6 MailChimp module.

Read full post

Understanding Omega Theme

Drupal 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.

Read full post

7 Best Drupal 7 Themes

Best Drupal 7 Themes

Choosing a Drupal 7 theme for your site can be overwhelming. After all, there are over 800 available! This post will help you cut through the clutter and select the one that is right for you. But before we get started, it's important to understand two special types of themes.

One type that can save developers a lot of work is a base theme. These themes take care of basic layout, solve common theming problems and are meant to be extended with a sub-theme. Another special type of theme is an administration theme. These make the Drupal back-end easier to use.

I've sorted through the non-commercial themes of all types and put together what I think are seven of the very best.

Read full post

10 Essential Drupal 7 Modules

Drupal 7

With the release of Drupal 7 in January of this year, more than 50 modules were moved into Drupal core. With so many changes, I thought it would be a good time to go over some of the modules that (almost) every Drupal site should have installed.

Read full post

How to Add Stylesheets to Your Theme

Add stylesheet to Drupal 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.

Read full post

7 Steps to Better SEO On Your Drupal Site

SEO Tips

I was recently asked how much a web manager should care about Drupal SEO. Isn't that something for the marketers, after all? I think optimizing for search engines is something everyone who manages a Drupal website should understand, but it can be tough for those new to the subject to know where to start. The good news is that basic search engine optimization (SEO) is something that every site administrator can learn. Here are seven tips to get you on Google's good side.

Read full post

Module Review: Webform

Drupal Webform module

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.

Read full post

Five Best Community Building Modules

Drupal community building modules

Building social, community-based websites is becoming more common as organizations seek to better connect with their customers. Drupal has plenty of options for strong community building, but which modules are the best? Here are my choices for the top five modules for building a social website using Drupal 7.

Read full post

Module Review: Drupal Workbench

Drupal Workbench Module

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.

Read full post

Introduction to Content Types

Drupal content types

In order to get the most out of Drupal, you need to understand content types. A CMS can (and in most cases, should) have different content types defined to assist in classifying and displaying site content in a flexible and efficient way. Examples of content types include news articles, blog posts and basic pages. But with Drupal, the types are only limited by your imagination.

Read full post

Top 10 Drupal Developers

Best Drupal developers in the world

Drupal is a content management powerhouse, but have you ever wondered who the developers are that have made it so great? These men and women have spent countless hours contributing to core, developing modules and themes, and promoting Drupal to the world.

Here, in no particular order, is your Drupal All-Star team.

Read full post

SEO for Drupal

Drupal SEO modules

SEO is a topic a lot of people find mysterious, and with so many charlatans claiming they possess the "secrets" to ranking highly with search engines, it's no wonder. But the truth is, anyone can learn to do a good job at SEO and there are Drupal modules that can help. 

Read full post

Installing & Configuring A Drupal Theme

Installng a Drupal theme

This screencast steps through the process of installing and configuring a Drupal theme. I've selected Pixture Reloaded for this exercise, which is a great theme for anyone that wants to do as little coding as possible. Based on AdaptiveTheme, it features HTML5 and some easy to configure CSS3 effects like rounded corners and drop shadows. 

Read full post

Pages

  • 1
  • 2
  • next ›
  • last »

Follow me on Twitter Follow me on Twitter
RSS Feed Feedburner
Email me Subscribe by email

Categories

Content Management

Drupal (all)

Marketing

Modules

Themes

Tutorials

Web Design

Website Management

Search form

Friendly Machine Supports the Drupal Association

© 2012 John Hannah. All rights reserved. | Affiliate Disclosure. | Guest post, guest blog!