Congratulations to Drupal for winning the 2008 Best PHP Open Source CMS from Packt Publishing! What a great award to receive. It's nice to know that the CMS that I'm most faithful to is receiving awards like this. Keep it up Drupal Core maintainers.

Link

I came in this morning to find that our Main College Website wasn't accepting logins to the site. When I would try to login it would redirect me to the page it was supposed to but not log me in so that I could have access to the admin stuff. Since I couldn't login I didn't have access to any of the Watchdog log to see where the issue is coming from. I immediately went to forums to see what I could find.

I found a couple of discussions about it, most of which were all related to the 'sessions' table in the database. Then I found another discussion that recommended checking the Watchdog log through the 'watchdog' table in the database. So that's where I went next. This is what I found:

I have now been a member of drupal.org for a year! That's pretty exciting. I was thinking that it might be fun to put a post up talking about the things that have happened in the last year, and the things that I have learned. This might be a good resource to those just researching different CMSs, so here goes:

What a year it's been for me! A year ago we made the final decision to go with Drupal for our CMS at my work. I can say that decision determined a lot of my future in web design/development. Here's what has happened in the last year:

One thing that I was trying to do for a while on my work website was create a block that contained a list of nodes that reference the current node. At that time I had searched in a bunch of places, but didn't know exactly what I was searching for. It so happens that it's actually a really easy views arguement.

What I was trying to do was show a list of the jobs available that are related to the current Program Page that they were on. For example, if they were on the Welding program page they would see a list in a block of the jobs on the job board that have been referenced to that program. So they would see welding related jobs that would be applicable to them!

I set this blog up a couple of months ago thinking that it probably wouldn't go anywhere. Well, it still hasn't. :)

But, I did get some activity on a few of my posts that were supposed to have attached txt files to show the code snippets that I came up with. Unfortunately I, being the newbie that I was back when I started this blog, didn't check my access control checkbox to allow anonymous users to view my uploaded files. I really feel like an idiot, but I did check it and those attached files are now available. Hope everyone didn't lose hope! :)

A module that I haven't been able to live without since I got into Drupal is called Menu Trails.

This module has been a lifesaver for me and a necessity on most all of my Drupal sites. One thing that I like to do on my Drupal sites is use Views to generate lists of nodes. Views makes that kind of stuff quick and easy. Menu trails fills a gap that, in my opinion, Drupal has completely left out. The Menu Trails module allows you to take node types and taxonomy vocabularies and automatically add them under a certain menu item (retaining breadcrumbs).

I was hired at the Davis Applied Technology College in August of 2007 with a sole purpose in building them a brand new website that worked. Their site, at the time, was running on an old version of DotNetNuke that had been customized to a point where it couldn't be upgraded. That wasn't the only thing bad about it, the content hadn't been managed on it for years in some cases. Onto the case study:

Design

I started with a theme called "Tech" for the new website. I've always been a fan of starting with something and going off of it even if it ends up being completely different.

My wife used to work for an Orthopaedic Surgeon and she always told me how hideous their website was. I had looked at it a few times and never really thought much about it other than that it was terrible. It was a "flash-based" site that moved a little too much and was IMPOSSIBLE to update. The "web guy" that they had wasn't very responsive when it came to changes on the site so the content was really outdated. The office manager contacted my wife and told her that they wanted me to jump in and do the site for them. After a brief meeting to make sure that I was capable to do what she wanted the project was underway. She told me that I was the 10th web designer that she had tried to get to build them a new website. I was determined not to let her down.

The dentist of Flynn Dentistry in Kaysville Utah came to me with a few questions. He had pre-built a website for his Dental Practice using Apple's amazing Website Creation Tool, iWeb. He had just uploaded the HTML files and then started thinking about how to get more exposure on the web. My advise was to either go with the HTML pages from iWeb or else go for a full-blown Content Management System in Drupal. Drupal is a very Search Engine Friendly (SEO) system that speaks clearly to Google making it a lot easier to become noticed. That's exactly what I did. We also went to the extent of adding a sweet "Special Offers" page that has a link to a print-ready version that you can print and bring into the office.

I'm going to start a new tradition of including blog posts of "modules that I love!"

My first "module that I love" was one that I just came across this evening while doing some research for a small client of mine in the Las Vegas area. Her e-mail was as follows:

"Could you tell me how I can take a ton of emails from excel spreadsheet and put them in a distribution list so that I can blast a flyer about our grand opening"