Verbosity 2.0 ~ Talking about life on Drupal

Drupal's Zen theme starter kit includes this nifty feature to rebuild your theme each time you visit. It prevents caching so you always see your fresh new code. For a developer this is some handy candy.

Rife with warnings about performance if the settings actually appear, you should take note that if you are using Zen you need to explicitly disable this setting (yes, even if you can't see the option for it).

On one of my larger client sites I found that due to a misconfiguration in the theme-settings.php file the options for the theme were not showing up. You can normally find this caching option on your zen-based theme's configuration page.

Upon doing a find-and-replace in my theme-settings.php file and unchecking the "Rebuild theme registry on every page." option in your Zen theme things should be a lot faster on your website.

The graph above shows the impact this change had on my server. As you can see, the site in question is by far my biggest traffic driver on this host and it was wasting a LOT of database traffic (note the drop off at around 3pm, it should be pretty obvious).

Also be sure to check your "performance" settings under "site configuration" to enable css caching/compression for an added kick.

I finally made it out to a real Drupal event!  Not just a local meetup... so much more than that.

The two-day educational networking event took place at North Studio - a Victoria web development firm which also does a lot of work in the computer training department.  Our schedule started with a focus on the basics: installation of Drupal, SEO techniques, a dash of Information Architecture and more.  That was all really valuable stuff, but for me it was a bit redundant.  If you've been following my threads for the past year you will probably understand what I mean.

What I Learned

The presentation on Actions, Triggers and Rules by Dave Tarc was insightful.  I have worked with Actions and Triggers on Drupal 6 and the Workflow-NG module for Drupal 5.  Rules takes over where Workflow-NG left off.  Essentially this module just lets you add some rudimentary logic to your Triggers so you can automate things on the site.  What could be better than automating things?  In my world: not much.

Are you tired of resizing your images, saving them, uploading them, only to find out that you need to do the whole process over again because you forgot to size the images correctly?

That was editing for the web a decade ago but it doesn't have to be that way any longer.  With Drupal you can manage your images online and this tutorial will show you one way that it can be done.

This howto is based on a Surrey Drupal User's group discussion where Ryan Dempsey talked about his favourite recipe for managing images.  This howto extends that discussion with the addition of some additional "nice to have" modules.

The good news? You can do most anything you need/want to do to images with Drupal.  The bad news?  Some fringe coding might be necessary to make it totally awesome. 

Drupal can make your website fully capable of managing images in a sane and logical way so we don't have to manually resize our images ever again.

Using Core Components aka. The Old Way