DSN Wire - Articles

Google Analytics is a great way to monitor site usage and traffic. You add Google Analytics to your site using the Google Analytics module, which is super simple to set up. After it's in place, you can go to the Google Analytics site and dig into a ton of data, create custom reports, etc. But you can also use the Google Analytics API to pull Google statistics into your own site and display them there.

Drupal's default methods of handling user names, emails, and registration processing work pretty well out of the box for many web sites. Drupal assumes your users are online, have unique email addresses, and that you want to create a site that grows organically as users find it and register themselves.

If you haven't yet heard the buzz that's been building since Drupalcon DC in March about the fabulous Migrate and Table Wizard modules, written by the smarties at Cyrve, then here are a few questions for you:Does the phrase "data migration" conjure up images of being repeatedly stabbed in the knee with a rusty fork?

This is something we hit a lot when doing performance analysis on very slow websites, so I figured I'd issue a public service announcement. :)It's not uncommon in more complex themes to have many different block regions, and even dynamic regions that will only appear on certain pages or when viewing nodes of certain types.

We had a great week of on-site training at the Department of Commerce in Washington, DC last week. They've already launched recovery.commerce.gov in Drupal and they're currently in the process of rebuilding Commerce.gov as a Drupal site. We spent the week with their team making sure that they understood not only how to build and present a Drupal site, but also the benefits of the Drupal community.

Memcached is a service that allows entire database tables to be stored in memory, drastically speeding up queries to those tables and alleviating database load. In Drupal, the Memcached module allows you to store all cache tables in memory.We've covered how to install Memcached before on Debian and on Mac OS X.

This is a basic comparison between PHP and JavaScript. It's intended for users familiar with PHP and looking for JavaScript equivalents.JavaScript and PHP Comparisons:VariablesScopeTypesCastingNULL and empty() valuesBooleansCase SensitivityDumping variablesObjects and ArraysDeclarationSyntaxAssociative ArraysControl Structuresfor() loopforeach() loopVariablesVariable ScopePHP and JavaScript take two very different approaches to declaring variables.

While at Drupalcamp Copenhagen I got into a few conversations about Drupal aha! moments, particularly around theming. After trying to talk in the abstract about the things that finally "clicked" for me when I was learning Drupal, I offered to write it up with some specifics. So, for my Danish buddies and any other curious Drupalers, these are my two biggest aha!

The 'Views' module is one of the mainstays of Drupal site building. It allows non-programmers to build highly customized listings of data that match certain criteria, then present that data in a variety of ways.

You can create custom CCK fields, widgets, and formatters for any situation, but it can be hard to see how to do it. I finally found time to create an 'Example' module that creates a simple field, formatter, and widget, with lots of embedded documentation about what belongs where. You need to create three files, an .info file, an .install file, and the module itself. The code below creates a very simple textfield, but it can be used as a starting point for any custom module.

These days, almost every major Drupal site is using CCK, the module that lets you add custom fields to any content type. Among other things, CCK lets administrators rearrange a node type's contents using a simple drag and drop interface. In the past, this only worked for fields that CCK itself managed.

A couple of weeks ago, Twitter started circulating news about the upcoming Twitpocalypse. The easy 'default' storage format numbers in many programming languages and databases is the 'signed integer.' It's usually capable of representing values from -2,147,483,647 to +2,147,483,647.

We're proud to announce the fifth video in the Lullabot Learning Series. Advanced Theming for Drupal, which picks up where the Drupal Theming Basics video lets off.Here's the description:The Lullabot Learning Series continues with an in-depth look at the advanced features of Drupal's theming system. In this 2-hour video Nate Haug, Jeff Robbins, and James Walker explain how to completely control the HTML markup Drupal generates.

Distribution? Eh? What's That?

One of the best ways that we've found to learn Drupal is to look at a finished site. Drupal's out-of-the-box experience doesn't really show its full potential. In our latest Drupal theming videos, we needed to build a complete website in order to provide content to "fill out" the theme being built. Once we finished that site, we thought that video viewers and others might like to be able get access and try it out for themselves.

We're proud to announce the fourth video in the Lullabot Learning Series. Theming Basics for Drupal covers, as you might guess, all of the basics of Drupal theming. Here's the description:The Lullabot Learning Series continues with a hands-on look at Drupal's theming system. In this 2 hour and 44 minute long in-depth video guide, Nate Haug, Jeff Robbins, and James Walker explain the steps for translating a web design into a Drupal theme.

We've had many requests for sample videos from the Lullabot Learning Series. We decided to post an entire chapter from each video.

I needed to find a way to create nice charts from Views data so that end users could adapt them to selected date ranges or categories, but I found that this is not as easy as it ought to be. It took quite a bit of time just to figure out what the options were, let alone decide which were the most promising solutions for my situation.

A few weeks ago, I put together an April Fool's Day post about a bunch of usability work that Lullabot had been doing with Drupal.

Calais?