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Adding a CSS Markup Detective to Drupal

Submitted by mgifford on

A sherlock monkeyI ran across Holmes by Red Root thanks to Sean Yo and decided to check out how well it would work within a Drupal environment. Turns out that this clever markup detective will dig through & quickly highlight improper HTML markup with quite a lot of accuracy. There's so much power in CSS 3 it's exciting to see how it can be used to enhance accessibility. You can see the full testing suite in action, but I've also deliberately added some errors within this page.

One of the challenges with accessibility is that even when you have a great theme & have evaluated the modules and plugins your site uses, you still have to grapple with user generated content. Holmes, the CSS Markup Detective, is a very simple tool which provides a great way to double check that your content is written effectively. It's also trivial to add this into your existing Drupal theme and have it only loaded when an editor is viewing the site. Use of automated testing tools like WAVE & FAE need to be included in any accessible site and the holmes.css file is a great addition to this suite of validators. None of them will ensure that your site is without barriers, but it will at least alert you to the easy stuff that is often overlooked.

The code is now GPL and all you need to do is download the CSS file. In our case we're using the Genesis theme & so have placed it in our sub-theme's css directory. Then it's simply a matter of editing your template.php and adding this to your YOUR_THEME_preprocess_html() function:

Gitting Earth Hour & Drupal

Submitted by mgifford on

We've used CVS, SVN over the years and are now using Git. If you've not a programmer you probably wouldn't be familiar with tools like Concurrent Versions System or Subversion which allow for precise sharing & collaboration between thousands of people but with over 150,000 lines of code in Drupal Core, you really need to have a way to manage these details to ensure that you've got the highest quality control possible.  Git is the latest in social coding and because if it's distributed framework it should allow many more people to evaluate, experiment & collaborate with the Drupal community.  

Git & Drupal

Knowing that Drupal was adopting Git, we made the move to adopt it, replacing many of our other repositories.  There is quite a learning curve to get it set up and integrated with our processes, but it's been very impressive thus far.  Our ability to quickly integrate around a standard tool set that allows us to both track & centralize changes for our projects is already beginning to pay off.  Configuration files, default error messages, custom modules, client themes, not to mention Drupal core and community contributed themes/modules.  

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