Drupal

After months of neglect, I am finally writing a new post!  As I dove head-first into the world of web consulting, I got too busy to keep this site up-to-date.  But now I'm back--still busy, just better organized.

Drupal gets considerable praise for being versatile, flexible, and open. At the same time, it is often criticized for being difficult to configure, with a large learning curve even for seasoned developers. So given the criticism, why do I use it? And why do I recommend it to clients? This article provides an overview of Drupal, and in doing so, explains why I stake my business on it.

To follow up on my previous post, I found a way to edit the php code to place the "bloginfo" block at the top of the content. One of the problems with Drupal is that if you add any blocks to the content region of a page, it puts the blocks below the content. I wanted the block on top of the content. This post on drupal.org helped me. I adapted it to use the "bloginfo" block as follows: (put this in the "center" div in page.tpl.php for your chosen theme) <?php if (arg(0) == 'blog' || $node->type == 'blog'): ?> <?php $block = module_invoke('bloginfo', 'block', 'view', '0'); print $block['content']; ?> <?php endif; ?> This shouldn't be so difficult. I hope somebody has already created a Drupal theme that handles this by default. If not, maybe I should create one. Oh, one more thing: even with this, I could not find a way to make the block title appear. I had to write the block title within the bloginfo block content.

I am using Drupal to manage the content in this site, and so far, I find myself stumbling at nearly every turn. My main difficulty is in getting the presentation the way I want it. There are many sites out there built on Drupal, including http://twit.tv, and of course, http://drupal.org. They managed to get Drupal to work for them. So I know it is possible to get it to work for me. So why I am even using Drupal? Because I want to learn about it. I also want to learn about Joomla!, but I found Joomla! overwhelming to start with, so I decided to start with Drupal. However, digging deeper into Drupal, I'm having lots of trouble. Take this blog as an example: I want to get a blog banner to appear at the top of the page, with the blog title, some artwork, and maybe even a slogan. However, I can't manage to do that. I even uploaded the optional "bloginfo" module, which is supposed to let me at least have a blog title, but I can't even get it to appear. I also had trouble getting the default title, "paul's blog," to go away. I finally found a post that describes how to edit the php code to get rid of the title. Even that post wasn't quite accurate (the php code was much more complicated than the post showed), but it was enough to allow me to edit the php and succeed. However, what do we do for less-sophisticated users who are not savvy with php? Maybe I'll find the time to do something about this. There's an opportunity to make this easier--maybe I should join the drupal project and help out. Maybe somebody already has something to help--I just can't find it.

Welcome to PaulMcKibben.com, and welcome also to my blog. I envision this blog as a place for me to post various thoughts and opinions on software engineering, the software industry, the telecommunications industry, open-source software, and technology in general. I intend to keep this blog related to my professional life--I have another blog for my "unprofessional" life, called Running Through Life, which chronicles my trials, tribulations, and small victories as I train for marathons and try to lead a balanced life. As for this whole site, I intend for it to be a place for me to try stuff. For example, right now I'm trying to use Drupal to manage my content in this site. It's a big experiment, and I may decide to move to something completely different later.