Web design

This video screencast is part III of a series that documents the development of a new, real-life Drupal website from the ground up. It shows you how to create a custom theme that gives your site a unique look-and-feel, using Drupal's built-in PHPTemplate theme engine. Tasks that are covered include theming blocks, theming CCK node types, and theming views. Video produced by GreenAsh Services, and sponsored by Hambo Design. (21:58 min — 24.1MB H.264)

I hope that all you fellow Drupalites have enjoyed this series, and I wish you a very happy new year!

After much delay, the stylish new 3rd edition of GreenAsh has finally hit the web! This is the first major upgrade that GreenAsh has had in almost 2 years, since it was ported over from home-grown CMS (v1) to Drupal (v2). The site has been upgraded from its decaying and zealously hacked Drupal 4.5 code base, to the latest stable (and much-less-hacked) 4.7 code base. It sports a snazzy new theme, complete with fresh branding, graphics, and content layout. It is using quite a few new modules that are only available in more recent versions of Drupal, including views, pathauto, and the improved captcha module. And, best of all, it has finally been switched over to the category module, which was built and documented by myself, and which had the purpose from the very beginning of being installed right here, in order to meet the hefty navigational and user experience demands that I have placed upon this site. Read on to find out how, and why, the upgrade in all its pain and glory was carried out.

It is said that a house is the sum of its parts. If you take away the doors, the windows, the roof, the floorboads, the inside walls, the power lines, and the water pipes, is it still a house? In developing Drupal Lite, I hope to have answered this question in relation to Drupal. What are the absolute essentials, without which Drupal simply cannot be called Drupal? If you remove nodes, users, and the entire database system from Drupal, is it still Drupal?

While doing some AJAX programming, I discovered a serious and extremely frustrating bug when using XMLHTTP in Internet Explorer. It appears that IE is prone to malfunctioning, unless a document accessed through AJAX has its HTTP header set to disallow caching. Beware!

Attending the Web Essentials 2005 conference (others' thoughts on WE05) was the best thing I've done this year. I'm not kidding. The Navy SEALs, the heart surgeons, and the rocket scientists (i.e. the best of the best) in web design all spoke there. But guys, why did you have to overuse that confounded, annoying buzzword Web 2.0? And what's with the MacOcracy?