You might have read a post I did recently about how Aegir makes managing Drupal installs really easy.  Well, wondered how to get it all installed?  Here's a video with instructions.

Also - be sure to read Development Seed's post about the new release for all the goods on new changes etc...

When you're building sites which use many contributed modules (+ views and panels) you can end up with a ton of CSS files being called at the same time.  Generally the main down-side to this is load-time, so most Drupal site developers choose to use the css-aggregation function (found under Site Config > Performance) that comes stock with Drupal.

The problem with using Drupal's aggregated CSS is that you end up with a crazy mashed-up chunk of CSS which can be a pain when you're still editing it live on a site in development (for example, using firefox's web development toolbar or firebug).

Asides from the load-time issue, I noticed something else whilst doing x-browser testing on a new site we're developing @ design guru; Internet Explorer 7 won't load more than 30 (or 31?) CSS files at once!  Supposedly a security feature, this annoying phenomenon makes CSS/styling dev work a pain in ie7 but fear not, there's a work-around and its as easy as installing a module!

The 'IE Unlimited CSS Loader' module will save much head-scratching - it fixes the ie7 problem and lets you still work on your site's css without using the Drupal aggregator. Nice. :)

As anyone managing multiple Drupal sites knows, it can become a nightmare to either try and keep them up-to-date via old-school download-modules-then-upload-via-ftp or svn methods.

Last week Walkah blew my mind by showing me his new setup that used the Aegir Hosting Method and Drush Make to rapidly deploy new sites from known profiles (oooohhh Drush Make..) as well as easily upgrade modules etc for existing sites.  I'm about to switch over to this method for hosting all of our client and incubator sites over @ Design Guru and I thought to clue you all in to a great write-up on how these things come together, thanks to mig5.net [read it here]...

Development Seed's just announced that their Open Atrium distro/'installation profile' of Drupal is just about ready to be released.

For those of you who haven't heard of it yet, Open Atrium is an interesting Drupal-built Project Management package (basically, some modules, Drupal 6 and a custom theme with some config options setup when you install it).

I'll get into a fully hands-on review of it soon, but for now, pop over to Development Seed's blog to read the deets and be sure to watch the video below to clue into this cool free project.

There are so many reasons to making your site easily visible on Social Networking websites and platforms - they raise general visibility and offer access to communities which may not otherwise find the information you spend time publishing in your posts.

Of course, one of the most agile word-of-mouth Social platforms on the web is Twitter and you may have recently noticed a pretty cool widgety thing people are using on their blogs/sites to include a 'retweet' link and counter of how many times a post has been tweeted - its powered by a site called 'Tweetmeme' and installs pretty easily on any website - whether using static html or a CMS like Drupal.

When you take a peek at the tweetmeme page containing the necessary embed code it may not be too easy to tell how to use it with your Drupal site - and though there's a module out there for Tweetmeme, it may not offer the flexibility you require for clean theming.  Fear not, there's an easy way to go about embedding this and all it takes is a small modification of the de facto embed code. 

All you have to do is:

• copy the following code,
• replace 'http://mysite.com' with your own root URL and:
• replace 'twitterhandle' with your twitter handle (if you want reweets to automagically incude @yourtwitterhandle - you can opt to delete that line from the code otherwise.

<script type="text/javascript">
tweetmeme_style = 'compact';
tweetmeme_url = 'http://mysite.com<?php print $node_url ?>';
tweetmeme_source = 'twitterhandle';
</script>

The trick then is to take this code and include it in the appropriate version of node.tpl.php for your theme - for example, if you only want the tweetmeme widget to be displayed in blog posts for a content type called 'blog' then bung it into whatever place you want in your node-blog.tpl.php file.  You can learn more about versioning the node.tpl.php file for this purpose in the drupal.org theming guide.

Basically what we've done here is include some php to tell the embed code the specific URL for each post - without this php it will only work on full-node view pages and not Views/Panels that list multiple nodes.

*You can see the widget in action here on this site below - just to the right of the tags for each post.

Incase you missed the big news back in September, there are some major things happening in lieue of Drupal 7's imminent release - specifically related to making it easier than ever to use.

The video above introduces Aquia's new 'Drupal Gardens' project; which will provide a hosted-Drupal platform that people can create sites with very very very easily, aided by a custom theming engine which seems to work very much like Squarespace's.

it looks like Drupal Gardens won't be available to the public until Drupal 7, and the base set of modules Acquia chooses to include with it, are stable.  When it is out though, I perceive Drupal suddenly becoming much more attractive [or just less daunting?] to graphic designers, hobbyists, and developers who want to make quick-turnaround, simple Drupal sites.

Imagine - finally being able to have a Drupal-run site without worrying about what modules you need to build it, or any considerations of database/hosting/code stuff.  Of course, they haven't yet announced how updates or feature advancements will be handled by their central hosting platform, let alone the module set that their hosted Drupal Garden sites come with.

its been quite some time since I last posted here on whydrupal.com and its not because of anything more than being totally engrossed this past year in exploring some amazing things you can do with Drupal 6.  Okay, well, it sounds like there's a ton of stuff I could have clued you into right? 

Well, unfortunately I was moving too fast to keep track of all the tips and tricks I've learnt recently so I'll be putting a couple of massive posts together this week trying to catch up on some essential info.

Furthermore, there is so much happening in the wider world of Drupal - what with Acquia now being an established company offering excellent commercial service for this great software, to the imminent release of yet another major version and people coming together to make its User Interface better than ever, to Drupal 6 being stable for some time and that resulting in new modules being created powerfully leveraging the (now standard) Views(2) and Panels. 

Given all these developments, I'm rethinking what this site's purpose is and how it can achieve it best - please post comments on this if you have them (and yes, I'm paying more attention to weeding out spam comments now so your thoughts won't get buried in a see of Viagara links! Ha.)

(This post is in reply to one that Dries Buytaert wrote on OStatic.com)

I agree with Dries that Open Source CMS' are putting more power into the hands of people who may not know or want to learn code, and that as their learning curves get less steep we will see more people jumping into creating and growing their websites themselves; depending on the type of website they want to have.

We've of course seen the *huge* acceptance of wordpress for simple content publishing (read: 'blogging') amongst all sorts of people ranging from tech pros to near-luddites.  As people use more websites that have richer feature sets everyday they'll no doubt want to see the functionality of those sites in their own; for a while yet, though it may not require custom coding, I think the role of 'web master' or 'web developer' or whatever-you-want-to-call-them will be around for quite some time.

T  read more »

Okay, so I'm quite interested in options for avoiding spam which do not add to the frustration people already feel when entering info through forms on the web - we've just moved the spam protection on the site over from reCaptcha to Mollom.

In the whirlwind of spam comment deletions I just went through before switching over I mistakenly deleted some genuine ones - for that I'm sorry guys!  Hopefully now we can leave things be and avoid seeing comments about viagra all over the place! :(

Tumblr is a great idea - the hosted service lets you sign up for free and then create a blog that is essentially comprised of different types of content - text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio and video.   Your tumblog can be posted to quickly and re-themed using their provided ones or custom html; all editable within their web interface so there's no need for ftp'ing files etc...

Okay, so its yet another blogging tool.  What's so great about that?  Well, asides from the fact that it has different content types to segment views by them (something not in the de facto wordpress standard approach), tumblr's unique in letting you import rss feeds automatically into your tumblr site!  Cool eh?

Drupal heads reading this will no doubt instantly say "Whatever man, Drupal can do that in a second!" and they're right; it can.  We recently took a stab at building out a site to do everything that tumblr does for Flavorpill in NYC using Drupal 6 and some contrib modules.  Ultimately, we wanted a site that lets anonymous/public users contribute as well as logged-in ones, all submitting the same types of content.  The main benefit of registering on-site was keeping track of your posts with a profile page that features a User Tracker.  read more »