Drupal 6

SEO Fluff, Marketing & Other Nonsense

Submitted by mgifford on

I'm the first to admit that search engine optimization is important. I know that there is a lot to be learned about how to drive people to your site and ensure that they keep coming back to it. Two years ago it was estimated that there were 63 billion pages indexed by search engines. How will your site show up in the first pages of Google results if you don't get an edge over everyone else?

I know that there really are 'SEO Experts' out there, that know the web well and have seriously researched search engine behavior. But there are an equal number of people who have taken a course or two, bought some software to help them and whose real strength is selling their service.

A lot of 'SEO Experts' like to put content in static HTML pages in which they have complete control. Unfortunately, this makes the content harder for anyone in the organization to update and also makes it impossible for tools like Path Track to be able to monitor folks through your site. We recommend leveraging Drupal rather than building a hybrid site.

Accessibility Enhancements for Drupal 6 Themes - Admin Side

Submitted by mgifford on

The last in the series of Drupal 6 accessibility enhancements that we're publishing will focus on improving the admin side. There is a good guide to developing theme overrides on Drupal.org. This post provides examples of modified functions that are improvements over what is in Drupal 6, mind you there are several elements fixed in Drupal 7 which can't easily be back-ported.

Now the distinction of admin side vs user facing is a bit outdated in most modern CMS's. In most cases, the same HTML tools that are required to administer a site may also be used to make a nice interactive site. Usually it's a matter of making sure that any forms are presented in an accessible manner.

Accessibility Enhancements for Drupal 6 Themes - Public Pages

Submitted by mgifford on

Following my previous post with examples about using invisible elements, this post includes further examples of how to use the template.php file to overwrite Drupal 6's default functions for greater accessibility. More details on how to use these functions are available from Drupal's documentation.

With many sites, the only forms that they have available is the search function. This is a more accessible rewrite of template_preprocess_search_result()

 function EXAMPLE_preprocess_search_result(&$variables) { $result = $variables['result']; $variables['url'] = check_url($result['link']); $variables['title'] = check_plain($result['title']); $info = array(); if (!empty($result['date'])) { $info['date'] = format_date($result['date'], 'small'); } if (isset($result['extra']) && is_array($result['extra'])) { $info = array_merge($info, $result['extra']); } // Check for existence. User search does not include snippets. $variables['snippet'] = isset($result['snippet']) ? $result['snippet'] : ''; // Provide separated and grouped meta information.. $variables['info_split'] = $info; $variables['info'] = implode(' - ', $info); // Provide alternate search result template. $variables['template_files'][] = 'search-result-'. $variables['type']; }

Accessibility Enhancements for Drupal 6 Themes - Invisible Elements

Submitted by mgifford on

Now that Drupal 7 is almost out the door, it's a good time to look through the known accessibility issues and document what are the best practices that have been implemented that can be brought into Drupal 6 themes.

The first bit is perhaps the easiest. Bring over the code to handle hidden, invisible & visible on focus elements:

Ubercart as a donation system + Moneris as a Payment Gateway

Submitted by jesse on

Hopefully this blog entry will help a few people overcome some of the hurdles in setting up a donations system. We are a drupal shop so all the following is for drupal 6.

In this case the client simply wanted to have a way to collect donations from supporters of their political campaign. The only real constraint was that it needed to integrate with the Moneris payment gateway system. I was looking at creating a custom donation system and integration to Moneris, but in the end opted to use Ubercart. Ubercart is an awesome beast of a Shopping cart system that has many great features and useful contribs, 90% of which I did not need to take advantage of. However, Ubercart, in an extremely stripped down form, looked like it could offer everything I needed in terms of accepting and tracking donations. There was also an existing UC Moneris contrib module that looked pretty simple.

What you will find in this blog

HOWTO: add headings tinymce plugin to WYSIWYG

Submitted by stevem on

The WYSIWYG module does a great job of centralizing and abstracting the use of various graphical editors in Drupal. Its relative newness means it is poorly and confusingly documented in some respects. I recently had to add the headings plugin for TinyMCE and ran into a lot of confusing information about how to make that happen.

Spring Cleaning Your Drupal Site

Submitted by mgifford on

Many people celebrate spring by doing an intensive cleaning of their house, getting rid of stuff that isn't needed any more, putting away the winter clothes/jackets and cleaning in those places that you don't get to on a daily basis.  It occurred to me that most CMS admins should take on a practice like this at least every year when I started looking at broken links. 

Checking for Bad Links

Now the dead links are inevitable in any website that's up for any length of time.  I was looking for a way to provide a list of broken links when I came upon the Dead Link Checker site.  Just read that if the spider finds a link towards their site, the bot will crawl deeper into your website, cool. This trolls through a site for up to 45 minutes collecting and looking for broken links.  Quite a useful service, and like so many on the web it is free.  There are other ways to check an entire site's links, but generally most free services only allow you to check by the page.  That's useful for any site and is pretty painless (other than tracking down and deciding what to do with the old links). 

Migrating WordPress Plugins to Drupal Modules - Earth Hour

Submitted by mgifford on

It was Friday afternoon and went over to search for terms on Twitter that I like to keep an eye on when I ran into a post from @haggaret. It was a call to convert an Earth Hour WordPress Plugin over to Drupal.  Now I'm very aware of environmental issues, but there are 8765 (or so) other hours in the year to worry about, so what's the big deal about this one.  I'm still not sure, but in solidarity I decided to check it out and see when it was, unfortunately it was 8 days later on the last Saturday of March. 

But really, how hard could it be?  A bit of CSS, tad of javascript, and heck, most of the logic had already been figured out for WordPress.  It was a bit more difficult than it seemed at first, but never-the-less, by the time there was one week remaining until the Earth Hour countdown of 8:30-9:30pm on March 28th, 2009, I had a working module for Drupal. 

Was interesting to see how this spread through the Twitosphere, getting a few folks trying out the code within a few hours of providing a download able version.  I had a less functional version the previous evening that I posted to pastbin, but didn't get any feedback on.  I had thought it would be neat to get some spontaneous collaboration around improving this module if the right people were watching.

Earth Hour Drupal Module - Learning to Turn Off

This has been slightly revised to reflect the status of this project for 2011.

Tell all your visitors you support the efforts of Earth Hour. It's a simple measure for the environment.

With the Earth Hour module for Drupal you can easily show your support and have your site automatically "shut off" for the hour, no matter where in the world you are.

The plugin counts down to earth hour, counts how many other sites are using this plugin, and share the link to earthhour.org with your visitors.

I was inspired to create this module by @haggaret who asked on Twitter for a Drupal version of the plugin for @bravenewcode's Earth Hour WordPress Plugin. It looked pretty simple to construct and I had never done a Word Press to Drupal port, so I decided to take it on.  

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