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]...

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.

Quite frankly, implementing WYSIWYG editors (and choosing the right one) for Drupal websites has been a pain in the ass the past few years.  For a while I bounced between FCK and TinyMCE - both integrated in the right fields fine and played well with IMCE for image uploads, but I remember finding their markup dirty (lotsa br tags etc..) and clients getting quite confused with line breaks in the editor not being truly mirrored on live content.  Of course, some of this is due to configuring Input Formats properly, but then there's also general interface and aesthetic issues with those mentioned editors.

Recently I've begun implementing HTMLbox on a bunch of sites - its simple, seems to markup html pretty well, and affords site users the basic buttons for simple formatting and link embeds [look out for a more in-depth review soon].  However, one downfall with it is a reliance on IMCE for facilitating embedded image uploads.  For anyone who's ever used IMCE, you'll know how confusing it can be for anyone unfamiliar with inline editing - though it integrates with the editor, its interface is still seperate and requires a lot of styling effort to pretty it up etc...  read more »

The conventional approach for rounding corners on websites has always involved creating images to position creatively via CSS at the top/bottom/etc...  read more »

Something that can get confusing for site users is when you have created 'sections' of your site comprising of blocks, Views, Panels etc - often cases in Drupal 5, the menu system won't follow a Panel, for example as belonging to a menu item (it instead wants to refer to nodes only - which means that even if you use something like the Menu Trails module, you may run into problems).  read more »

A few days back the second Release Candidate of Drupal 6 was posted for download on Drupal.org .  I'll be blogging a bit over the next couple of weeks about some neat things that Drupal 6 features as opposed to previous releases of the CMS, but for now wanted to note that site theming is getting easier as versions of Drupal advance; which is an exciting development for anyone interested in making sites that are aesthetically unique and provide enjoyable user interfaces.

To get cracking in discovering how Drupal 6 can offer more power in site theming, be sure to watch Moshe Weitzman's screencast introducing the Theme Developer module; a new part of devel which lets you know what theme functions are being called on your site, as you look at it!  Sort of like a Web Developer toolbar or Firebug extension for Drupal :)  read more »

I *love* Drupal's simple RSS news aggregation system.  However, when adding my facebook status feed to my personal site just now I realised that a coding oversight restricts the automatic blocks created for aggregated feeds to a minimum of 2 posts.

Now, for something like showing your facebook status on a Drupal site, you probably only want to show one item - that being your latest status update, not the last 2 or 5 etc...  So, you'll need to go to 'modules/aggregator' and edit your copy of the aggregator.module file.

Look around line 269 for the following code - I've added a '1' to the array - this allows the aggregator blocks to offer you a display of just the most recent feed item.

Note: I found this issue with Drupal 5.1 - it may have been corrected since then...  read more »

One of the coolest stock features of Drupal is that it can display tables of node editing/adding activity to general site users - both for all activity on the site as well as per user (on their profiles).

Some of you may be familiar with this functionality from social networking sites like Facebook (the Wall on user profiles), and thus know that sometimes all information shouldn't show by default in these listings.  For example, you may not want to display every edit an admin makes to somewhat-static page content. 

Guess what?  Drupal's so cool - it not only shows you tracker info, but also lets you customize the display of it!  All you need is to firstly activate the tracker module, then install Views and activate the stock-packaged tracker view.  read more »