Drupal 6

We all know how important it is to keep your website secure and updated. A couple of days ago new security and bugfix versions of Drupal 6 was released. When I first saw the announcement listing both v6.18 and v6.19 I initially thought v6.19 was a panic release fixing a problem with 6.18. It wasn't until I further read up on it I discovered it was intentional.

One thing I always wondered about when it comes to Drupal is why there are no out-of-the-box setting for the size of the Body field in content types, as well as the comment textarea field. I mean, they are big (body is 20 rows for example) and take up a lot of screen space. Since they already come with a resize option it is very easy to resize them when needed.

Drupal is doing a fantastic job with separating content, structure and design for websites. However, when it comes to developing a Drupal website, especially adding new features to an existing website, you will undoubtable run into issues that will require a lot of extra work.

Normal practice is to have a development server where you develop new features. Then you make a test implementation on a staging server. Finally, when everything have been thoroughly tested, you implement it on the production server.

One thing that fuels the power of Drupal is all the small focused modules that exists. These modules are absolutely lovely to work with. Not only do they almost always solve the task they are developed for perfectly, but also because they add very little, if any, complexity to your projects.

This time I have taken a look at contributed modules that improves your control over input and presentation of content. Many of these modules are also great for better SEO of your website.

Often when I browse the web and stumble on a website that looks to be built using Drupal I usually take a look at the source code for it. Way to often I am then facing a wall of links to CSS files and JavaScripts. This is not only true for small sites, I have seen it on big popular websites as well.

Then I am thinking - How in £#&% can they miss the Performance settings that Drupal comes with as standard?

For a website I am building for a client one requirement is that certain roles shall only be able to create a limited number of nodes of certain content types. The website is also going to be available in multiple languages and users shall of course be able to create translations of their own nodes.

At first I thought this was going to be a quite complicated requirement to solve. It turned out to be the complete opposite and ended up being a very elegant solution.

The Drupal Localize Server project show real promise in its quest to make Drupal a great platform for multilingual websites.

Before you had to download a language file for Drupal Core. Even though many modules come with language files, those translations aren't always complete and you have to wait for new releases to get updates.