Planet Drupal TV

There's a mistake I've made which a few others have made too. The mistake is rushing into your new Drupal site and populating your menu right away. You simply add new menu items as placeholders until you can create or add the data. You set the menu path to something like , and populate away.

The frustrating part about this, is that your menus may not work as expected - at least when expecting cascading menus using the Primary links (or any other menu) as a hierarchy. Drupal needs to have something to point to in order to build it's internal menu.

While trying to think of what to write, regarding Drupal taxonomy, it was my kids’ story
last night that inspired this posting about this video covering how the taxonomy module works and what it means to your Drupal site.

SEO is one of the more critical aspects for any web site - at least if you want to be found in the search engines. The fact that Drupal is capable of being super SEO friendly is a great benefit. However, it doesn't do you much good to simply know that Drupal is SEO friendly. With modules like SEO Checklist from Volacci you can certainly walk through the myriad of possible SEO options.

Yep, we're living in a media rich world (just in case you didn't notice the video on this web page ). In fact, what's the second most popular search engine? Is it Bing? Nope, it's YouTube of all things (last I heard).

So, all you really need to know, is how to bring your Drupal site up to the media rich standards of the new web and activate some media modules. Personally, I've used a number of them, and I'm quite comfortable digging around with Javascript and jQuery, however, there's something to be said for the easy route.

The Drupal Webform module is both a popular and useful module for collecting information from web site visitors.

For the most part, you can install, activate and start to create your own webforms right away. The module is pretty easy to use, well crafted and created by one of my most favorite Drupal developers.

Like many other content management systems, Drupal is built on PHP. With PHP, you can dig in and make it do whatever you want. Likewise, you can dig into Drupal and make it do most everything you want - well, almost. If you’re not afraid of writing PHP code, then the sky’s the limit. If you’re limited by the time and desire to learn PHP, then Panels is likely the way to go!

I recently received a direct tweet from the folks at Development Seed with notice about the beta release of Open Atrium. Having been quite interested in seeing what they’ve got, I quickly downloaded a copy and got it up and running.

I decided to record the process and provide my first impressions. Bear in mind, these are first impressions and I’m not an expert (by any means) about their system. I dug into the system as a developer and skimmed through it.

Maybe your experience was similar. You learned about Drupal, you thought it was great (still is) and you wanted to make it do more.

Of course, you knew about adding modules. There’s a whole section on Drupal.org. You visit the site and WOW! Get ready to surf through over 4,000 modules. You’d have to spend enough time with at least 10-a-day to know what each one does.

Whether you’re an avid blogger or you simply make the occasional post, there’s just something uncomfortable about editing long posts and working with pictures when you’re in a web browser.

Metrics: Boy, do we like measuring things! Most everything in our lives is captured all around us, from the very day we are born. The very first thing they took from me was my lbs and inches and the time I popped out. This was before I even had a name.

So, I guess, it goes without saying (watch, I’ll say it). We like to measure things (there, I said it). How about web traffic? Well, we’ll capture that too! It used to be that you needed to install your own scripts - and - in ‘em pioneering days of the ‘ole web, you’d write your own Perl script to parse the ‘ole web log.