Drupal

A few days ago, Jeff Burns wrote “Source Order: why I think Zen gets this wrong”.

His basic premise is that content-first HTML source ordering is an SEO-driven idea, is not backed by any accessibility studies, and goes against user expectations. While I respect his opinions, um… he’s wrong. :-)

Originally published on http://palantir.net/blog/designers-and-themers-took-drupalcon-dc-storm

Originally published on http://www.palantir.net/blog/3-years-drupal-love

Like many web developers, I’ve written a lot of applications from scratch and I inevitably got to that point where I thought, “It will be much better if I write something re-usable that will help me with any application I want to build in the future. I should write my own framework!”

Over at Brainnovate, Scott Miller writes that a CMS is bad for innovation. Now his opinion is clearly biased and ignorant of how innovation actually occurs, but there are some points I would like to clear up…

“Just because I haven’t personally used it, I do know a thing or two about Drupal. It *is* a powerful piece of software.”

The swing…

Here’s a quick one if you are in need of a noon-time distraction.

I was just interviewed by Jeff Robbins for Lullabot podcast #55. I’ve listened to this Drupal-lovin’ podcast since its inception, so it was pretty cool to be asked to do an an interview.

We mostly talked about the Zen theme, which I’ve put a lot of work into and, if you don’t already know, is a fantastic foundation from which to build your own custom-designed Drupal theme.

After a month and a half beta period with only 5 bugs discovered (and squashed), the O-fficial Zen 5.x-1.0 version has been released. Yay!

Thanks to everyone who helped with new features, bug fixes and documentation suggestions! The help is greatly appreciated!

For those of you who haven't looked at Zen since its 5.x-0.6 days, take it for a spin. No longer do you need to un-theme the Deliciously Blue style out of Zen before adding your own styles. It’s a true base theme.

Back at the beginning of February, chx (a Drupal master coder) posted a story to Drupal’s homepage asking for people to come together and work on an “elusive login issue” that people had been reporting for over a year. Some users were reporting that no matter how many times they tried to login to Drupal, they would be promptly put back in front of the login form without the anticipated “Unrecognized username or password” error message.

Steven Wittens was a co-creator of Drupal’s beautiful default theme, Garland. And he has a thought-provoking post about the current state of design in the Drupal community and his frustrations in trying to improve it.

Many of the arguments in the comments to Steven’s blog were that designers tend not to collaborate. And that they can be difficult for programmers to work with. And that the Drupal community lacks many good designers. Some even said designers are prima-donnas and they don’t know CSS.

Drupal 4.7.4 has a bug in it regarding story previews. The teaser preferences allowed you to set the maximum length of a teaser, but the underlying code treated it as the minimum length of a teaser.

So, say you wanted a teaser that was 400 characters or less; what you would get was a teaser that was always 400 character or more. Ouch.