At work I am building some pretty complex content driven pages with Contemplate. I have some node data being displayed in the main content area and the rest in a dynamic block using Views Arguments. To keep a better handle on the data being displayed I am the Contemplate module, which I have found to be an extraordinary module for what it can do.

I ran into an issue today where I wanted to hide the label to the field if the field was empty. After some searching online and digging I couldn't really find anything, so I did a little research on my own and was able to come up with the solution. Here it is:

Just a quick post today. I went and took the ALA Survey 2008 and was impressed. Great questions applicable to all web designers. Go take it!

To end my drought I want talk a little bit about my web host that I've been using. I am by no means a "10 year" Drupal developer like some people that I've talked to. Any mention of Drupal 4.7 goes right over my head. I'm not ashamed of that. When I came into Drupal I was using a localhost so Web Hosting wasn't really ever an issue for me. I figured that eventually I would get to the point where I would have to worry about it, and that day came a little while ago.

Since this is my primary blog now I thought I would post this random news that I'm pretty excited about. I also want to hopefully be able to help anyone else that comes looking for answers like I was.

About a month ago I put in my Halo 3 Disc into my Xbox 360 and it decided to start bouncing around and kill my DVD Drive. After that incident no disc would work in the drive resulting in a "Unplayable Disc" error in the dashboard. I decided to call Microsoft just to find out that it would cost me $100 because it was out of warranty. Since I'm not a huge Micro$oft fan I decided to try it myself knowing that it would void my warranty and any authorized repairs by M$.

Now that Father's Day and the important birthdays in my family past it's time to start blogging again. I've been able to do some pretty cool things over the last few days with the limited PHP experience that I have. That's the beauty of Drupal!

One issue that I kept running into with a site that I'm working on for my job is that we needed multiple menu blocks for different departments. It is getting to the point where we would need two long menu blocks for each department. It's been a frustrating issue that wasn't really a big deal until I actually saw them on the site.

It has been a while since my last post. The last few weeks have been really crazy both at home and at work so I have a good excuse.

Last week I was in Atlanta for some training on some new software for work. The software is Customer Relationship Management, a.k.a. CRM. Nowadays keeping track of customers and their history in a company is next to impossible without some good software lending a hand. That's where Salesforce.com's software comes in.

About a month or two after I started my job I was asked to start looking at different CRM Solutions for the company. Since I had been hired on to be the Web Administrator they figured that I would know a good CRM "web app" if I saw one.

I had a challenge that I wanted to share on my blog, so here it is. For my job I'm creating a new website with a page for each Program that we offer (i.e. Welding, Medical Assisting). There is a set of quick facts that need to be associated with each program, but only be displayed in a block in the sidebar. These include information that might be most important to potential students.

My original thought was, that views would be the best way to go. I would just create a block with the fields that I wanted, and it would display based on the NID on the program page they were on. While that sounded really easy, it actually wasn't as easy as that. The biggest trick was figuring out what Views Argument to use to tell it to check the NID first, then display the information. The attached .txt file is the views argument that ended up working.

One aspect of Drupal that I really have been impressed with is theming. Drupal makes it incredibly easy to take a static HTML file and turn it into a Drupal Theme template. In fact it is possible to even use some of the HTML/CSS template sites to purchase the template files, and turn it into a Drupal template in no time. All it takes is some getting used to and it can take only a few hours to get a template up and running.

Now that I consider myself engulfed in Drupal I can honestly say that I kind of enjoy "Drupaling." Here I am at 1:13 A.M. just running off to bed after some pretty intense work on a project for the alumni from my High School. The idea is to create a way for each class to be able to communicate and share information in their own site (versus using Facebook, etc.). Initially it was going to be focused on a specific class, but now I'm going to try and pitch it to the different groups.

Since my site is fairly new I thought I'd start with the basics for my blog posts. I'd like to review a recent open source project that I came in contact with about 9 months ago. The name of this project is called, Drupal. I came in contact with Drupal during some research that I started doing when I got hired on at my current job. My first project was to research Content Management Systems (CMS) and figure out which one we were going to use for their new website that I was hired on to do. Coming into this I had no experience with any CMSs and had no idea what I was jumping into.