modules

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.

Nick Lewis gave this talk about what's happening in Drupal's Design and Architecture at DrupalCon San Francisco 2010. You can find him on Twitter at nicklewisatx

The Kitten Methodology

When I first encountered Drupal, it was a weird box that I didn't really understand, and I just pawed at it for a little while. Now I'm a Drupal expert, and I got here by just playing around with Drupal like this.

Spy on the natives

• Understand the Drupal Culture. Get on IRC and pay attention to what the contributors are saying.

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

This is a talk moderated by Dmitri Gaskin, a 14 year old, freshman in high school. He's been doing Drupal for 4 years.

This is a Q&A session, and so go ahead and ask your questions, and either I or somebody else in the room should hopefully answer them.

Q: Apostrophes. Apparently automatic title generation interferes with apostrophes in title names. If I add an apostrophe, it doesn't appear in the database; the custom content will appear in the DB.

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

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!

By default, most Drupal setups have an upload file size limit of 2 megabytes. That's enough for uploading most content like images and short Word documents and PDF files. But start uploading larger files like audio or video, and you'll quickly run into this frustrating upload limit. Some video files can be hundreds of megabytes! Here's how you can get around the limit.

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.