Millwood Online

We've just launched the new Mark Boulton Design studio site using Drupal.

http://www.markboultondesign.com

One of the great things about Drupal is that you can run more that one site off one installation. This saves disk space and load on your server, it also saves maintenance time. With only one installation to manage and update the time spent administering your site drops greatly.

So, how do you setup a multi-site? well, it’s very easy.

1. Firstly install Drupal as you would normally. Download it into your web root, copy the settings.php file, add a files directory, setup a database. etc. The domain name for this site for example would be http://www.example.com.

As mentioned in previous posts I am writing a Drupal book. I can officially announce the book will be entitled “Professional Drupal Module development”, it will be published by Wrox Press, who are a brand of Wiley, the book will fall into their Professional series.

With this book Butcher has touched upon a great topic for the Drupal community, and the great thing I found when starting to read the book is not much JavaScript knowledge is needed. When reading the book I quickly scanned Chapter 1: Drupal and JavaScript and Chapter 2: Working with JavaScript in Drupal. The first chapter gives a good overview of coding languages used, Drupal and Javascript, the second gives a good overview of how Drupal can use JavaScript within a theme, and how the theming system works.

Earlier in the year I was asked by Packt Publishing if I would like to review some of their Drupal books on my blog, obviously I jumped at the offer and quickly e-mailed back a big fat "YES". A week or two ago a copy of "Drupal 6 Themes" by Ric Shreves landed on my door mat, since then I have been working my way through the book and compiling this review.

Today I had the task of checking out Drupal core and a load of modules for a new site, but all those CVS commands made me think there must be an easier way. So I started looking into scripting the process. This is when I came across Patrick Corbett's blog post "Drupal CVS Checkout Shortcuts".

Have you ever wished you had an awesome Drupal theme like me?

Well, now you can! I have made the "Millwood" theme (the one from this site) available on Drupal.org. http://drupal.org/project/millwood

My "customer" just asked me "can I see the user's role when they contact me on the contact form". I looked at the option of setting up web form module, using hook_form_alter or hook_mail_alter.

Finally the hook_mail_alter option was chosen, because it seemed the quickest, and the Contact Profile module was born.

All the module does is add the user's name, email address and roles to the bottom of the email sent from the contact form.

Since becoming a "professional" Drupal developer earlier this year one of the hardest things I have found within my team is best practices for Drupal development. When maintaining my blog or web startup all best practices go out the window. The approach taken is to SSH into the server, get all of drupal core and contrib using wget, do all main module and theme development on localhost then FTP them to the server.

I have been blogging about it for ages (well, a month) but today I launched the Alpha version of Blog to it.