drupal 6

Frank Febbraro is the CTO of Phase2 and the architect of the transition of whitehouse.gov to Drupal. He gave this talk at DrupalCon San Francisco.

Due to NDAs I can't go into great detail about the things I'm presenting, but I'm happy to be able to share what I can with you guys.

Overview

Whitehouse.gov scales to lots and lots of page views. Scaling means more than adding servers and increasing page views, it means planning and processes, and growing and maturing the process of delivery. We'll be talking about infrastructure, but other stuff as well.

Are you looking to hire a Drupal developer? Do you know how to separate the good Drupal developers from the not-so-snazzy ones?

Drupal 7 is coming, like it or not! With the upcoming release, many theme designers are anxious to know what they'll have to do to migrate their existing Drupal 6-compatible themes to make them work with Drupal 7. Here are the changes I found most interesting:

One of the best ways to get to know Drupal is to find the useful parts and, well, use them! Here are the most popular modules in Drupal 6, according to the stats at Drupal.org.

10. Google Analytics

As mentioned in today's New York Times, Nanosolar has revealed the record efficiency of their low-cost printed solar cells and secured orders for $4.1 billion in orders for its first solar panels.

I love being able to use Webform to quickly whip up a form for a client, like for a web-to-lead page or a contacts database. One customization that clients almost always request is to modify the text on Webform's confirmation page. Unfortunately the way to do this isn't immediately apparent... in fact it's kind of hidden!

Drupal's menu system is highly robust and really customizable through the GUI. One common complaint is that it doesn't highlight parent menu items when one of their children is selected, but this can be solved using Chapter Three's Menutrails module.

However, what if you want more custom control over your menu highlighting? One customer of mine wanted menus on some pages highlighted depending on the path. Good gravy, how do we do that? Here's one way.

Ever tried to make an RSS feed for a custom view using Views 2 and Drupal 6? It's not that intuitive, and you get a lot of scary error messages!

Fortunately, most of these can be safely ignored. An archive post on Drupal.org details how to do this, and get past the nasty error messages like "Row style:Missing style plugin."

RSS XML Errors

After upgrading a client's site from Drupal 6.12 to 6.13, the FAQ module stopped displaying the main FAQ page. I flushed the caches, tried visiting the site as an anonymous user, checked the error logs... nothing was working.

It turns out the trick is in the taxonomy module. Apparently on upgrade, sometimes the vocabulary you're using to categories FAQs gets disconnected from the FAQ content type.