Drupal

The Nodequeue module is an invaluable tool in the Drupal developer’s toolbox.  It’s often the best and most versatile way to allow site admins to promote featured content.  That said, it is not without its drawbacks.

We've been DrupalCon participants for a while now, going back to our first participation at DrupalCon Washington DC in 2009. Since then, Drupal's growth and the growth of this event have been exciting to watch, and we're thrilled to have our biggest participation ever in the event this year.

Here is a list of my favorite Drupal tools that aid in developing, managing, and maintaining a Drupal website.

Drush

Versions supported: All Drupal versions

To quote the module description for drush:

Here are some of my high-level reflections on CapitalCamp DC this weekend:

As always, the energy, interest, and momentum that Drupal continues to gain is so encouraging to me. It's exciting to see the broad ecosystem of interested parties that attribute Drupal as a key factor in their continued success online. Drupal is being used in many important - and varied - ways. We've known it for years, but the evidence is everywhere now; Drupal is much much more than content management or "social publishing."

Drupal is an enabler and accelerator: 

Capital Camp — the DC Drupal Camp — is coming up next week, July 22–23, at the Marvin Center. 

Forum One will not only be there to learn, but also to teach. Although it's sold out now, if you have tickets, you can expect the best in local Drupal talent for two days of learning and collaboration.

On June 11 and 12, Forum One joined Amazon in supporting a "Seattle Drupal Barn-raising" event. For the last few years, the Seattle Drupal community has picked a small, local nonprofit and come together to build/re-build its web presence. In addition to helping the nonprofit, these events also serve as opportunities for newer developers to receive mentoring on real projects from seasoned developers.

Having attended the last few U.S.-based DrupalCons, the upcoming Chicago event is easily the most exciting. Why is that? In a word, Drupal 7. Okay, maybe that's two words. Architecturally, it's a huge shift involving a new database layer, a new rendering layer, better form handling...the list goes on. And we're also reaping the fruits of all the user experience testing. Lots of good things to come.

If you're using Acquia Search or a self-hosted ApacheSolr search instance, you've already noticed that the default listing leaves a lot to be desired. Fortunately, it's not extremely difficult to make these results look exactly the way you want.

For starters, I'm assuming that Views 3 is already installed.

Create a new view

One of Drupal's strengths is in the ability of the Taxonomy module to handle hierachical categories. It makes lists like this easy:

For years, we have been advising clients on how to build, manage, and grow successful online communities. In these engagements, we have relied on our mantra, "people first, technology second," encouraging our clients to focus their energy on providing useful content, facilitating sharing, and connecting people, and to avoid a disproportionate focus on technology questions. This hasn't changed.