drupal 6

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.

"Landing page" is a marketing term that describes a page on your site that a visitor is directed to from an outside source, usually via a paid SEM campaign. Creating landing pages en masse is pretty easy with Drupal 6.

I'm going to describe how to create the simplest type of landing page, a single page which presents an offer to the user followed by a contact form or "web-to-lead form." This form collects the user's name, email address, and any comments. These details are forwarded via email to someone in your organization so they can respond.

Step 1: Content

There's some controversy in the Drupal community over which characters to use to break up your site's paths. Most sites use either dashes or underscores. Personally, I prefer underscores for readability reasons. To me, it's easier to mentally parse this url:

http://www.davetech.com/drupal_consulting_services

Than this url:

http://www.davetech.com/drupal-consulting-services

SEO Implications

Moluom is a anti-spam service that plugs in to Drupal and other content management systems via contributed modules. According to their website:

Spend some time researching Drupal online and you'll probably find a lot of griping about Drupal -- that it's hard to use, or difficult to understand. Lots of people run into roadblocks setting up their first Drupal site, from experienced developers to nontechnical experimenters. Some of this criticism is deserved, but some of it is excessive, and over time a number of Drupal myths have been built up. It's time to do some debunking!

1. You Need to Code to Use Drupal

This site gets traffic from all over the globe, and sometimes I want to present different blocks to different users based on where they're located. For example, I might want to feature content about internationalization to visitors from Europe. In my case, visitors from Kenya sometimes find this site when they are looking for Davetech Group Kenya, a local computer retailer. My goal was to make a block appear on each page when the visitor is located in Kenya, directing them to the Davetech Group website. Here's how I did it:

There are lots of articles out there about how to make your site more SEO-friendly, but few of these address Drupal sites specifically. Fortunately, there are a number of easy changes you can make to your existing Drupal site more appealing to search engines! Follow these six simple steps and you should see an increased number of visitors, using the same content you currently have published.