DVD Outtake: Drupal Module Selection Tips

One of the hardest things to do after getting your Drupal installation up and running is deciding which Drupal modules that you're going to use. There are literally thousands of modules to choose from, and so this can be quite a daunting task. It's even more overwhelming if you don't have a clear strategy for searching through, filtering down, evaluating and testing the viable module candidates in the vast Drupal contrib repository. You may have already come across valuable resources such as Lullabot's Top 40 modules podcast, the user ratings and feedback provided at DrupalModules.com, as well as the recently published module usage statistics on Drupal.org that allows you gauge how many people are actively using any particular module. These are all great resources to be sure, but there is also a lot of really useful information on the health of a module that you can gather directly from the links on the module's project page if you know where to look. module_selection_tips.png This 8-minute video is an outtake from the "Understanding Drupal" DVD / digital download that features the Lullabot team sharing their module evaluation tricks of the trade. They'll walk you through some of their favorite strategies for quickly filtering down the number of viable module options down to a reasonable number. If you enjoy these types of insights, then be sure to consider coming down to the "Do It With Drupal" Conference in New Orleans from December 10-12 where team Lullabot and a host of Drupal and outside community experts will be giving out a lot of practical Drupal site building advice like this. This is the last week of the last early bird discounts, and so save yourself a couple of hundred dollars and register today.

Drupal, duplicate content, and you

Does Google's "duplicate content penalty" harm Drupal sites? No! Here's why.

For years, Drupal has enjoyed a solid reputation as a search engine friendly CMS. It generates relatively clean, standards-compliant HTML out of the box; syncs up the important TITLE tag with semantically useful H1 and H2 tags in the body of each page; and provides short, human-readable URLs with plentiful options for customization. (Anecdotal evidence: several years back, I wrote a post on my Drupal-powered blog that mentioned the name of the company I worked for. Within two weeks, my blog post ranked higher than the company's own web site on Google.)

Recently, I've witnessed a number of discussions where people expressed concern about the way Drupal generates the human-readable URLs that help make it Google-friendly. In particular, they were worried about Google's dreaded Duplicate Content Penalty, a system designed to keep spammers from flooding Google with the same content at dozens (or hundreds!) of URLs. There's a lot of confusion floating around, so for the geeks in the crowd (and the not-so-geeky interested in learning how things work behind the scenes), I thought it would be useful to give a guided tour of how Drupal manages and generates URLs.

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How to build Flickr in Drupal

Using the delightful combination of Image and Image Exact Sizes modules, two parts Views, and a dash of theming magic, you too can have your very own Flickr clone... in Drupal! This recipe will show you how!

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Drupal Actions and Workflow Video

This videocast shows how to use Drupal's Actions and Workflow modules to create a simple trigger to send out notices whenever new content is posted to your site. (8 1/2 Minutes - 10 MB H.264 MP4)

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How to properly add CSS files

As I was working on cleaning up a few isses for the Javascript Tools module, I stumbled upon one issue dealing with overriding CSS styles. In this case, JSCalendar was adding it's styles after a theme's styles were being loaded. Obviously, from a CSS standpoint, it would be impossible for the theme to override and change CSS styles in JSCalendar. This needed to be fixed.

After some digging, I found this comment that explains this problem in more detail and outlines the correct procedure for modules and themes to add CSS files.

To summarize Tom:

<?php
// Modules should do:
drupal_set_html_head(theme('stylesheet_import', base_path() . drupal_get_path('module', 'mymodule') .'/mymodule.css'));
?>

<?php
// user-created PHP pages/blocks/comments/etc. should do:
theme_add_style('misc/local/my_custom_style.css');
// (theme_add_style is also used internally for the style.css files)
?>

<?php
// themes should do:
$output .= theme('stylesheet_import', base_path() . path_to_theme() . '/extra_stylesheet.css');
/* note that this should be BEFORE theme_get_styles, which will reference
  the style.css file and anything added by the user... themers will probably also
  want it located after drupal_get_html_head, which will bring in any module-specific CSS
*/
?>

Take control of your Drupal theme

Want to create a front page that's styled differently from the rest of your site? Perhaps you need a separate admin theme? Or how about a login page which only shows the login block and nothing else? With a little PHP knowledge these problems are easy to solve.

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