site design

Following up on my review of the book Drupal 7 First Look, here's a closer look at the creation of my first Drupal 7 site: a generic "sandbox" site to be used as the base for future sites. While every Drupal site you or I create will call for its own unique setup, there are parts of a Drupal configuration that I'll likely want to replicate on any new site, such as installation of key modules, or creation of useful roles and vocabularies that I always end up using. I'd prefer to do those things just once, rather than from scratch every time; hence the sandbox site. 

Here's what I did. Drupal beginners, see whether there's something useful in there for you.  

One common Drupal beginner question is "What kind of site can I make with Drupal?" – followed quickly by "How do I make that kind of site?". It's not hard to find answers. In addition to great Drupal.org resources like the Site recipes page, the Web abounds with lists of inspirations and how-to recipes for your next Drupal creation. 

I recently ran across 8 types of sites you can build with Drupal – not a great resource with hands-on detail, but a nice pointer to some of the modules you'll find useful for a news portal, video-sharing site, and so on. I took some time to update my Links page with that article and even better resources. Take a look, especially under the directory and showcase headings; you'll find enough Drupal ideas and blueprints to keep you busy for a long time.

Are there more recipe and blueprint sites I should add to the links?

So you're editing a Story node in Drupal, and... Wait, was it a Story? Or was it a Page node? Or is the node you're editing actually a Blog Entry?

When you create a node, Drupal gives you a big-letter reminder of what you're making: "Create Story" (or whatever the node type is) appears at the top of the creation form. Yet when you later edit the node, there's no easy reminder of what the node type. Clues in the path, the visible fields, or elsewhere may give it away to the experienced site builder, but not to a newcomer admin to the site. And to be sure, you won't often care what the node type is when making some small edits, but then again you might find yourself scratching your head as you stare at the edit form for a node someone else made, thinking that you'd like to make this change if it's a Story but that change if it's a Page...

There's a nice and very simple tip at the Josiah Ritchie blog to aid future editors (including yourself) on this small point.

In Drupal 6 and browsers make nice-nice!, I got all happy over the Safari 4 beta abolishing several bugs that had kept me from using Safari as my Drupal site admin tool.

However, I failed to post a crucial follow-up to that: it wasn't long before a new oddity forced me to toss Safari out the door once more. The problem was in buttons, such as those for opening a "Choose file..." dialogue when uploading an image. Sometimes – not in any way I could predict – buttons would be dead in the Safari 4 beta, doing nothing when clicked. That's an annoyance during general web use (such as when trying to submit a comment somewhere), but a show-stopper for admin work. 

The problem persisted even after the official Safari 4 launch, so it wasn't a beta problem alone. Yet a search on the Apple support forums and elsewhere didn't turn up people with a similar problem, so clearly it wasn't a real Safari problem at all. That's where I lapsed out of my usual vegetative state just long enough to remember that I had a couple of old third-party Safari plug-ins installed, Inquisitor and Safari Stand. They're both nifty tools, and perhaps later I'll play with Safari 4-tested versions, but at least one was gumming up the works; removing both has fixed the problem.

It's only been a few days, but so far I haven't found any problems remaining when using Safari for admin work on Drupal 6. Great! And there's a big bonus, as well: Apple's playing up blazing JavaScript speed as Safari 4's forte, and it's really making a difference on my iMac. Dialogues for images, links, and so on in TinyMCE pop up so much faster now than they do in Firefox. (And as a small bonus, the Top Sites feature is handy for quickly getting at any number of sites in progress.)   

I may want to head back to Firefox at times to use some specific web developer plug-in, but for general admin work, Safari 4's speed alone is making me happy all over again. Until the next show-stopping bug, that is...

Good God, I've been at the graphics software again. Restraining order be damned, I say!

The work I've now dubbed SEO, Traffic, and Revenue: Drupalace's Online Manual (STARDOM) is still very much in progress, with the next round of updates in the oven. But now that the upgrade to Drupal 6 is mostly taken care of, and a new theme garishly under way, I'll take up the long-neglected task of announcing the thing, and coughing up a STARDOM logo.

Next up: After upgrading more sites to D6, and putting up more STARDOM content, I'll start applying STARDOM how-tos to those sites. With stellar results, I'm sure. : ) (Or is that : /  ?)