How To's | Innovating Tomorrow

Drupal provides project owners with the ability to follow issues on their projects. Simply go to your My Projects page and you can see an overview of your projects and even grab a RSS feed of the latest issues. But, if you are just a project co-maintainer or a contributor who doesn't actually have access to a project there is no nice and easy place to follow the issues on that project. I used Yahoo Pipes to solve this problem because it outputs RSS, has quick add buttons for sites like My Yahoo and Netvibes, can be added to a page as a badge, and it provides JSON and PHP access. Continue Reading »

Content Management Systems are always being evaluated. Sometimes it's an organization looking for the next system to host their website. Sometimes it's someone writing a review about a system. And, still other times it's the competition taking a peak at the products they are up against. Let's take a look at some common areas we need to evaluate whether the system is open source or proprietary. Continue Reading »

When I first started looking into church statistics and measurements I found measurements like the the number of members at a church, the number of weekend attenders, and income for a church on any given week. These numbers give a little detail about the church but they don't provide much insight into how church is doing towards meeting it's goals. They provide some numbers that allow a church to be compared to other churches but they don't provide much detail about an individual church. Let's look at some measurements that can be taken in a church providing insight into how a church is doing at its, God given, mission. Continue Reading »

Rotating banner images is a simple way to spice up most sites. It adds something shiny that can hook people in. If you use jQuery, like I often do, then a simple way to do the rotating banner images is using the jQuery cycle plugin. This plugin can even be used along with drupals views module to create dynamic lists of rotating images.

But, there are some downfalls with this approach. For example, if you create a list of images for the jQuery cycle plugin to rotate through you need to set all but one of them not to display with css. Even though most of the images are not initially displaying they are still downloaded in many browsers. If you have a bunch of images loading that have any size this has a potential to waste a lot of bandwidth if those images aren't viewed.

This was a problem that I ran into working on a few sites. Here's a solution I use that solves this problem while working well with Views, jQuery, and any content Views can create. Continue Reading »

The views module for drupal provides a powerful way to create queries of content and then present it in a number of different ways. One of the ways I've seen seldom used is views generating lists and variables for javascript and jQuery. Let's take a look at how we can accomplish this fairly easily. Continue Reading »

Have you ever had the situation where you tried to clear a floating element in your web design only to have something not line up right? Maybe the box model in your design didn't line up right. Maybe a column was too long and ran over something it shouldn't. You look at your CSS and see clear: both; in the right place and can't find the problem. There are better ways to clear floats. They deal with cross browser issues and do so without adding extra elements to a page. Continue Reading »

Renaming tabs in drupal 6 is easy thanks to hook_menu_alter. In drupal 5 it's not so easy and there is no place to rename them outside of the theme system. So, let's take a look at how to rename tabs in the theme system. This method is similar to the method I outlined for removing tabs via the theme system. Continue Reading »

Altering menu items in drupal 6 is fairly easy thanks to hook_menu_alter. But, in drupal 5 it's not so easy. While we can't achieve all the power of hook_menu_alter we can remove tabs, among other things. Let's take a look at how to do this. Continue Reading »

Every podcaster has room for improvement. Whether that podcaster is someone who has just started their first podcast or someone who is a seasoned veteran, there is always room to improve. When Bob and I first started podcasting with the Geeks and God podcast we were not nearly as good as we are today (though there is still much room to improve). We've worked to improve, not only the technology behind the show, but how we present ourselves as podcasters. Here are a few of the methods I've learned to help me improve at being a podcaster. Continue Reading »

Right before I went on vacation, Jason asked how to setup an iTunes feed in views. I've discovered that there are really two ways to do this and one is much better than the other. Let's take a look at the two ways and their pros and cons. Continue Reading »