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Tilt 3D - Drupal DOM Visualization

Submitted by Harry Slaughter on January 10, 2012 - 2:11pm.

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.

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Get Jing

Submitted by Harry Slaughter on April 1, 2008 - 4:45pm.

I just found this very cool screencast creation tool that is free. It's called Jing. Installation is quick and pretty easy (though it does require the .NET 3.0 libraries for the Windows version).

Here's a sample screencast, a quick demo of cscope as a development tool.

 

 

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Drupal SEO is Easy

Submitted by Harry Slaughter on November 25, 2006 - 1:50am.
Nostradamus

I began the Devbee website back in March as a way to help others by way of documenting what I have learned about Drupal and also to drum up a little bit of business for myself. The content of this site is extremely targeted, and I don't ever expect to see more than a few hundred visits a day.

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Opcode Cache for Dummies

Submitted by Harry Slaughter on November 12, 2006 - 6:40pm.

PHP is an interpreted language. This means that each time a PHP generated page is requested, the server must read in the various files needed and "compile" them into something the machine can understand (opcode). A typical Drupal page requires more than a dozen of these bits of code be compiled.

Opcode cache mechanisms preserve this generated code in cache so that it need only be generated a single time to server hundreds or millions of subsequent requests.

Enabling opcode cache will reduce the time it takes to generate a page by up to 90%.

Vroom! PHP is known for its blazing speed. Why would you want to speed up your PHP applications even more? Well, first and foremost is the coolness factor. Next, you'll increase the capacity of your current server(s) many times over, thereby postponing the inevitable need to add new hardware as your site's popularity explodes. Lastly, high bandwidth, low latency visitors to your site who are currently seeing page load times in the 1-2 second range will be shocked to find your vamped up site serving up pages almost instantaneously. After enabling opcode cache on my own server, I saw page loads drop from about 1.5 seconds to as low as 300ms. Now that's good fun the whole family can enjoy.

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Dreaded blank page of death

Submitted by Harry Slaughter on July 10, 2006 - 11:53am.

A search for "blank page" of the Drupal.org domain yields about 37,000 results.

This is probably one of the more common and frustrating problems for Drupal admins.

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CCK discussion

Submitted by Harry Slaughter on November 24, 2006 - 11:47pm.

I think a lot of people, particularly developers, have misconceptions about the CCK module. I too misunderstood its real purpose and functionality when I first came across it. It's most definitely not a substitute for custom modules that create node types. It fills a current shortcoming of Drupal, which is the ability to add properties to nodes. I'm confident that Drupal will eventually abstract its node model to allow for more flexibility and more advanced features like node grouping and relationships. Meanwhile, CCK is doing a decent job at filling in some of the missing pieces.

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