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Creating an Alpha Pager with Views 2 and Drupal 6
UPDATE: Earl comments below how this is already built in. Two different ways to achieve a similar result, each with their own pros/cons.
Hats off to Earl Miles and the rest the views developers they have done a tremendous job with Views 2. While the interface is entirely different from that of Views 1, it is so much more intuitive that within a few minutes I had quickly forgotten my bewildered “oh no, I know nothing” look :)
From reading all of the docs and quietly watching development commits, I knew Views 2 was going to eliminate a lot of the Views 1 helper modules and open up a whole new world of awesomeness. While I haven’t seen many blog posts detailing just which functionality/modules have been replaced with Views 2, I wanted to kickstart things with my own discovery as I played around with Views 2 quite thoroughly this afternoon.
With Views 1, to build an alpha pager you would use the views alpha pager module in conjunction with your view. But what about Views 2?
Reducing Drupal blog spam
Spam—we all hate it and it’s not just for email anymore, hello Drupal comment spam.
To determine what is effective at preventing Drupal spam, I decided to run a little case study when I redesigned this site and the following are the conclusions I drew from trying a number of different combinations:
Blueprint Drupal Theme Released
Well, it took longer than I expected (announced it a couple months back), but I’m pleased to announce that my Blueprint Drupal Theme has been released!
This theme uses the most excellent Blueprint CSS framework to setup a starter Drupal theme to make theming websites faster and easier, especially in the cross browser area. The benefits of this framework include:
- An easily customizable grid
- Sensible typography
- Relative font-sizes everywhere
- A typographic baseline
- An extendable plugin system
- Perfected CSS reset
- A stylesheet for printing
- Powerful scripts for customizing your layout
- No bloat of any kind
Compared to the YUI grid CSS, I find Blueprint simpler and more elegant. I have used both frameworks on various projects and the Blueprint has consistently been easier and faster to work with.
Drupal admin menu bar released
One of the biggest problems I run into when creating Drupal sites is a proper admin theme. Sure, there are various techniques to have a different admin theme, but often I want to integrate that into the current design. Many times that is ok, but the real problem was the admin menu—where the heck could I place it, it often didn’t fit the design I was working on.
Well I thought about it a bit, then I took some HTML, theming logic, and a bit of CSS (and JS to help out our IE friends), and voila, an admin menu bar for Drupal that doesn’t interfere with your design.
Mom Blog Network's Drupal Widget System
Today, we announced the official launch of our new widget and API system for Mom Blog Network, the “sister site” to MothersClick. We’re excited not only because these products are great new features for our users, but they also highlight the successful development of our community application.
As an extension of our custom, Drupal-based white-label solution that powers the ParentsClick Network, our widget system ties in directly to new content being generated across our network of sites. In the case of Mom Blog Network, as moms vote on various posts making them popular, our widget system catches this data and sends it to a custom PHP processing engine that dynamically builds and serves the widgets. The advantage to this system is it allows us to support millions of widgets without invoking Drupal each time to serve them — we like our servers :)
Theming in Drupal 5.0: We're getting there!
As a self-proclaimed Drupal theming “ninja”, I’ve built plenty of sites that don’t look like Drupal. But to be honest, it’s certainly not that easy. So for the next 5.0 release of Drupal, I’ve done my best to get in as many patches as possible to making theming in Drupal easier—and you know what, we’ve certainly made some great progress. Here’s a rundown of the top theming patches that I got in:
- #73961 — Simplify adding CSS in Drupal
This was a great little patch that made it very clear and consistent how to add CSS files in Drupal. In 4.7, adding CSS files was a bit of a mystery, as I outlined in a previous Lullabot article. Now, starting with 5.0, it’s very easy: drupal_add_css($cssFile, $type = 'module'). That’s it. Just specify the type of CSS file, core, module, or theme, and this function will handle the rest, loading them in a correct and consistent cascading order.
TWiT.tv
After many months, the new TWiT.tv has launched! This has been an amazing project to work on and certainly my best work to date. I originally started on this project back in March 2006 when I joined Lullabot in its infancy as their first senior web architect. From the start I was ecstatic; TWiT was the first podcast I ever listened to and to be working closely with Leo Laporte to develop his new site was an amazing opportunity.
From the start, I took over this project completely—from developing to managing to client interactions to acting as the sole architect of the site—my skillset was stretched through a wide gamut. The project started with Leo sending me the design comps from Arktyp. They were certainly beautiful and well thoughout!
Announcing jCalendar - a jQuery date picker
NOTE: This project has been superceded by the most excellent jQuery Calendar. All development on this plugin will now be merged with that project.
I am pleased to announce that my jQuery date picker is now ready for consumption, check it out here:
http://tedserbinski.com/jcalendar/index.html
This plugin was originally written to improve the interface for adding activities on MothersClick.com and will be working as the new input widget for date module. Initial mom reactions have been extremely positive (from a couple beta testers) and we hope to roll this into production after we iron out the kinks with Karen to get this into date module as the new default widget.
Top Tier Gasoline
This blog post has been featured in the August 2007 issue of Klatsch, the Florida Crown Region Porsche Club newsletter.
In the November 2005 issue of BMW CCA’s Roundel magazine, there was a fantastic article written about gasoline and what you’re really pumping into your car each time you fill it up.
So what do you really put into your car each time you fill it up?