Drupal / CMS

The Zen theme is indeed one of the best themes for customizing your Drupal, in my opinion. The theme has lots of information in the page.tpl.php file, the usage of each Drupal function and CSS is included in the page.tpl.php template.

One feature i really like is the ability to have a fixed width of a site, Zen Classic makes it easy, just by checking a button. If you are new to Drupal and cannot decide on a theme, go for the Zen theme and enable the sub-theme Zen classic.

For those of you that do not know Drupal, are new to Drupal or are considering switching to Drupal, here is a nice video that answers your question in 57 Seconds. Short and sweet. Produced by pingVision. http://pingv.com/videos/1/what-drupal-57-seconds

Recent projects:

• Tecito.com A popular Hispanic news web site in Vancouver.
• VancouverLatinFever.com The official web site for DJ Cachete.
• Dancerueda.com An annual festival that attracts international Salsa Dancers.
• NeighborsAutomotive.com An auto repair shop.

As I mentioned in the about page, I design web sites using Drupal...Go to the Web Design page to read more.

I will show you how to create a header region and use it to place a banner or add any content to it. We will use the Zen Classic theme in this tutorial.

Open the zen_classic.info file and add this at the begging or at the end of your Regions section. Note that the name of the region we are using is headertwo, you can name it whatever you like, no spaces underscore and uppercase are fine:

regions[headertwo] = header two

Now open your zen-classic.css style sheet and add the next CSS to the very end of it, the CSS will hold the region we are creating:

.headerContainer {
display: inline;
position: absolute;
margin: 0 0.5em;
}


We need to modify the the page.tpl.php template, open it and add this:
Read This »

Why? I had to stay up late working on for the upgrade of Tecito.com. For those who are not familiar with the name, it is a well known site in the Latin community in Canada, especially in Vancouver.

The site uses Drupal, a powerful CMS system. Without going too much into details, i decided to upgrade the site to the newest version of Drupal, 6.5. Tecito was using version 5.X before. I took advantage of the long weekend.

I had some minor issues with the upgrade, found problems with the modules in use, a few of them are not fully compatible with Drupal 6.x. The database was backed up frequently, install and uninstall modules often, a the end, the upgrade was successful.

The site was launched today, check it out. http://tecito.com

A quote from the creators page:
Mollom is a web service that analyzes the quality of content posted to websites. This includes comments, contact-form messages, blogs, forum posts, etc. Mollom specifically tries to determine whether this content is unwanted - i.e. "spam" - or desirable - i.e. "ham."

This module does a wonderful job in blocking spammers from my site. When someone posts a comment, for example, Mollom sends the data to http://mollom.com, it goes through an analysis, it then returns the content back and classifies it as 'Spam' or 'Ham, now if it is unsure as of what to do with the information, it tags it as 'Unsure', it then presents it to the visitor with a CAPTCHA challenge.

You don't need to know all the details about how it works, just know that it guards your web site against spammers, so you can focus your time on generating content for your blog.

Mollom is a module that was initially written for http://drupal.org, but has now been ported to other CMS platforms. Here is a version for WordPress http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-mollom/ and for Joomla http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,v...

If you have a Drupal site and you would like to install it, visit http://drupal.org/project/mollom, the main page is at http://mollom.com

There appears to be a need in Vancouver for a Drupal group, so i have created one. The group will inform, educate and teach individuals who are interested in learning about the best CMS platform around - and it is open source.

There are so companies already using Drupal, from individuals, companies or corporations, universities, communities to government departments. Drupal is powerful, customizable, extensible and community driven support.

Setting up a personal blog, a community site or a school web page can be a challenging task - Drupal makes it easy. The group is intended for beginners and intermediate level, however, advanced users are welcome to join.

Once we have a good number of individuals in the group, we will try to do a Drupal gathering every month or twice a month, depending on the feedback.

The Drupal Group is set in Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=32800838904, or add me as your friend then join the group - hecmor@gmail.com