Drupal on System Overlord

A Hard Lesson Learned

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 15:00:00 +0000

For a few months now, I've been working on a side project for a local girl's volleyball club. While the people I'm working with are very nice, this whole project has been a lesson in how bad of a businessman/project manager I am. I'm struggling with whether this is a sign I should stop taking on these side projects, or if its a sign that I really need to pay more attention to the business side of things. If nothing else, I hope this will serve as a warning to others on what not to do.

Coming Drupal Trends

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 23:01:59 +0000

Based on Drupalcon last March and Drupalcamp Atlanta this weekend, I've seen some growing trends in Drupal. While some of them might "already be here" I don't think everyone's doing them yet. Some of them apply to web development in general, while others are more specific to Drupal.

Adaptive Web Design

We all know mobile is here and is going to stay. However, the days of 23-30 inch monitors aren't over. Making something that is highly usable on both ends requires adapting to the user's platform (hence adaptive design). Themes like Omega, AdaptiveTheme, and their derivities are probably going to replace base themes like Zen in order to make things more "adaptive." It's worth noting that Zen can be adaptive with media queries, but it's not designed for it from the ground up.

Customizing Built-in Strings in Drupal

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 04:15:00 +0000

At work, we had a situation where one of the strings built in to the Drupal User Interface made things somewhat confusing. By default, 'Enter your sitename username.' is displayed beneath the username box on the login form. However, we use a centralized authentication system called 'NetID', so this prompt was confusing to some users.

One of my coworkers had received the request from the user to change this text to "Please enter your KSU NetID." His first thought was to create a subtheme of our base theme and modify a .tpl.php. (It turns out this isn't even directly possible, you have to register a special .tpl.php handler first.) My first thought was hook_form_alter, but after a moment, I realized that was overkill for the task of changing a single string. I recalled that before we had used locale settings to modify strings being output, so I wondered if we couldn't do that here as well. The first step was to find the raw string, before any processing.

Boost, RSS Feeds, and Google Reader

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 22:30:27 +0000

For a while now, I've struggled with an issue on this site. Google Reader would sometimes show items that had already been displayed in the reader. They would be shown as new unread items, regardless of whether the "original" copy of that item had been read. I'm sure this irritated many readers, and I tried several times to fix the issue.

The feed was successfully validated by the W3C Validator. Multiple times.
Adding the feed freshly worked fine.
Adding the feed to other RSS readers showed only 1 per item.

I set up a cron job to pull a copy of my RSS feed regularly and save copies. I figured I could see if anything changed between versions. At first, the differing versions showed no significant changes. (Other than new posts where expected.)

Git On Your Web Server: A Security Reminder

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 22:53:21 +0000

Earlier this month, I wrote about managing a Drupal site with git. What I neglected to remember, of course, is this places a full copy of your git repository within your web server's document root. This has the potential to expose any data in your git repository -- a malicious attacker could (depending on your configuration) clone the entire repository, thus exposing source code, configuration files, database dumps, and other sensitive data.

Managing Drupal with Git

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 23:40:56 +0000

For a while now, I've been meaning to manage my Drupal site (and the modules and features on it) with git. The release of Drupal 7.7 provided a perfect opportunity to make this transition. I've now cloned the main Drupal.org git repository, added my features (as submodules) and added the modules I use (also as submodules). I'm still getting used to working with git, and I wish there was a way to push parts of my configuration remotely, but I understand why you can't.

Welcome (back) to Drupal!

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 01:21:23 +0000

Regular readers of my blog may have noticed a significant change. As of about midnight last night, I had completed the migration of my site from Wordpress 3.1 to Drupal 7. A few features are not yet implemented, including automatically posting my blog entries to Twitter, but the RSS feeds do work. Additionally, some of the RSS feed URLs have changed, so please check your feed readers.