Entries by Matt with tag 'Drupal'

Drupal solutions for news sites: Creation date vs. publish date

Submitted by Matt on Tue, 06/09/2009 - 14:16
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This is part 3 in a series of posts about Drupal solutions for common issues raised in developing news sites. See a brief preamble in my first entry about the topic.

Solution 3: "This article says it was published way earlier than it was actually published."

This is a seemingly small problem, and a quick fix. But it's subtle, and a good illustration and how sometimes the programmers and journalists have different ways of thinking about the content.

Drupal solutions for news sites: Rich text in node titles

Submitted by Matt on Mon, 06/08/2009 - 11:43
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This is part 2 in a series of posts about Drupal solutions for common issues raised in developing news sites. See a brief preamble in my first entry about the topic.

Solution 2: "Hey, I'm writing a book review. How do I make the book title italic in the story headline?"

Many are the times when I've wished we could get over our need to italicize titles of books, films and publications. Sadly, I don't make the rules of typography. Inevitably your editorial people will need to include bold or italic text (or even hyperlinks) in the headline (or the node title, as we developers would call it).

Drupal solutions for news sites: Multiple authors for nodes

Submitted by Matt on Fri, 06/05/2009 - 11:04
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As you might imagine, a significant part of my job at the Observer has involved creating sites that make publishing news online easier. I am, and always have been, a staunch believer in the fact that Drupal is one of the best web frameworks for news and publishing. The plethora of news organizations that use it now or are planning to use it soon bears me out on this one. That being said, Drupal's base functionality does fall short in several instances for a lot of common things that news requires. So, I'm going to describe common solutions that I've come to know in the course of customizing Drupal for several different news sites.

A morality tale about taking open source for granted

Submitted by Matt on Wed, 03/18/2009 - 22:32
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A few weeks ago, I went on a couple of job interviews. Sadly, all the firms I interviewed with ultimately turned out to be what I consider bad citizens of the Drupal community, and of the open source development community in general. That is to say, although they were using Drupal and other open source tools and often running quite profitable businesses as a result, they seemed to have zero interest in contributing back parts of their work or even interacting with other community members to help with documentation, logistics, etc.

On Drupal, Twitter, and the future

Submitted by Matt on Mon, 03/09/2009 - 19:39
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For the better part of last week, I was in Washington, DC attending this year's North American DrupalCon. Although a bit exhausting, mentally, it was a pretty interesting and enlightening experience. My first foray into the wider Drupal community was at last year's equivalent of this event, in Boston. It was there that I was more or less hired on the spot by the New York Observer, where I still find myself today. This year's conference was considerably larger (1400 attendees, up from 800 in Boston). I also noticed a distinct shift in tone. A year ago, the economy was still booming (or seemed to be). Development shops, media companies and even non-profits were in a hiring bonanza and looking to crank out new sites left and right. This year, everyone seemed much more contemplative.

Drupal Tip: Never query CCK tables directly again

Submitted by Matt on Thu, 01/08/2009 - 22:51
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I'm currently in the midst of rebuilding Politicker from scratch with Drupal 6. It's a lot of work, but a good chance to get some things right that have always dogged us when maintaining the current (Drupal 5) iteration. One particular vow I've made is to avoid ever querying a CCK field or type storage table directly in the custom modules I'm writing. This is a common practice in most Drupal sites that I've seen and/or developed. It's a convenient shortcut, but it can cause problems.

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