DevBee is about promoting the use of Drupal and open source technology through education and services.

Safely upgrading jQuery in Drupal (6)

tags:

I recently worked on a project which required a updated version of the jQuery library. While there is the jQuery Update module, it only allows you to upgrade Drupal 6 to jQuery 1.3. If you really know what you're doing and want to upgrade beyond that version, you can either hack core or create your own simple module to do it. While hacking core is certainly the easier approach (simply overwriting misc/jquery.js with a newer version), it is very bad practice.

Fixing corrupted menus

tags:

I'm not sure how it happened, but today I noticed that Drupal's menus were behaving very oddly. After upgrading to Drupal 6 and installing several additional modules, I noticed duplicate menu entries as well as other disturbing oddities. Items I was placing into the menu were not showing up. Menu items that I moved around were apparently saved but they did not appear properly in a dropdown context. 

Upgrading to Drupal 6

tags:

I've been putting it off for a few years, but I finally decided to upgrade devbee.com to Drupal 6. 

I didn't really need to, but it bothered me that I wasn't running supported code and I figured I might learn something. And I did. Mostly obvious things that I should be familiar with already. 

Drush


I've only ever played around with this. I don't like learning new things unless they are going to be truly useful to me. Drush is definitely something I shouldn't have ignored for so long. It comes in particularly handy when doing a site upgrade as you can download and install modules, clear cache, set variables, run DB updates and a lot more all from the command line. This tool is crazy good if you're comfortable in a terminal.

Tilt 3D - Drupal DOM Visualization

tags:

The following is a guest post by Mitchel Xavier

One of the challenges of developing with Drupal is to understand Drupal’s structure. Until now, when working with the DOM structure, the DOM inspector has been the best tool for viewing the structure. A new tool has been created to make the visualization of the DOM structure much easier to interpret. It is a Firefox add-on and is called Tilt 3D. It creates 3 dimensional interactive representation of the DOM elements as a layered visual image.

A requirement to use Tilt 3D is that your browser supports WebGL. WebGL is a Javascript software library which allows for the creation of 3D graphics very quickly and without the requirement for additional plugins. Currently Firefox is the only browser to support this tool. Firefox has supported WebGL since version 4. The other requirement for Tilt 3D is that it is supported with a capable graphics card.

Eating one's own dogfood -vs- dining out

tags:

The importance of project management tools is almost never fully appreciated. I am shocked at how common it is for a group of developers to go working without version control, ticket tracking, development documentation and so on. The very first thing I do when working with a new client is to make sure that they get these tools in place if they haven't already.

Those who are used to working without a complete set of project management tools never fail to appreciate the benefits of them once they are introduced. I consider it next to impossible for a team to work together without managing code and tasks in an efficient and highly organized way.[img_assist|nid=155|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=250|height=156]

Hopefully you do not need to be sold on this idea and are using CVS or SVN to manage your project already. You likely have some sort of ticket system. It is a little less likely that you have both of these components integrated with each other.

When it comes to choosing a solution for project management software, a die-hard Drupal user has a dilemna. On one hand, Drupal seems as though it should be the perfect solution. It's fully customizable, has lots of nifty project management related modules and, most importantly, it's Drupal! Why would you not use it? "Eating your own dogfood" is the way to go, right? Meh...

Syndicate content