drupal

Today's Drupal meetup in Ireland was, in my opinion, a huge success with a turnout of 70+ Drupalers with varying levels of Drupal experience. Surprisingly, almost half of the people who attended were complete newcomers, many of whom had never even installed Drupal!

Several weeks ago I took a fairly in-depth look at the current video streaming options available for Drupal 6. Shortly after I published the article, a new product entered the market - Dash Media Player. Dash Player is the creation of Travis Tidwell from TMT Digital, also the developer of the FlashVideo module for Drupal.

Out of the box, Drupal SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is pretty good. But there's definitely extra work that you can do to make it even better. In this short article I want to focus on a selection of Drupal SEO modules which provide fundamental enhancements that I think should be included in the Drupal core itself some day.

A Drupal site with several extra modules installed can leave quite a large memory footprint, especially when served through the beast that is Apache. Don't get me wrong, I think Apache is a great webserver and have used it for years without any real problems, but sometimes you need to squeeze a little more performance than Apache is willing to give.

Today saw the release of Drupal 6.4 and 5.10. All Drupal system administrators are strongly advised to update their systems as multiple security vulnerabilities have been found and fixed. The update can be found on the Drupal website.

Drupal 6 is a world class, award-winning CMS (Content Management System). It is free to use, modify and distribute, as it is Open Source software, licensed under the GPL (General Public License). Drupal is perhaps one of the most powerful and extensible CMS systems, capable of powering everything from small personal blogs to large, high traffic community websites.

The Drupal statistics module doesn't offer a lot in the way on configuration; It's basically either on or off. When it is on, it's not particularly clever about the way that it keeps track of page reads, simply incrementing a counter every time a node is accessed, and there is no control over what counts as a hit and what doesn't.

If your or your site administrators do a lot of work on the site from day to day, writing articles, tweaking things here and there, then every single time they view a post views will be logged, resulting in a skewed post read counter.

There will come a time when you'll want to add a new region to your Drupal theme, weather you are using a stock theme, a modification of a base theme such as Zen (like me) or creating your own theme from scratch.

Drupal 6 makes the creation of new regions as simple as adding one line of code to your themes template.php file. However, by default new regions created in this manor will only be available to your themes page template (page.tpl.php) and a little extra work will be needed if you want to display it somewhere else.

In this article I'm going to take a look at video streaming options for Drupal 6, from the point of view of setting up a user generated content video website. What provisions does Drupal 6 have for handling video content? Drupal itself has the upload module which allows you to upload files and attach them to nodes, but this doesn't really cut it for a fully fledged video content site as it has no support for embedded playback of these files.

I don't like the way Drupal formats the "Submitted by..." text for nodes and comments. So, I did a little bit of digging and found the offending code in the theme_node_submitted() and theme_comment_submitted() functions of node.module and comment.module respectively. These two functions are easy to override at the theme level by making a copy in your template.tlp.php file, and renaming the function to fit with your theme (replace theme with the name of your theme). I made mine look like this: