By desbeers on

A couple of months ago while chatting on IRC, Chx suggested me to write something about my experience with Drupal because I'm a long-time Drupal user already.

I rebuild my site Desbeers over the last couple of weeks. While it's nothing special; it's just a weblog, I used a lot of the 'hidden power' of Drupal to tweak the site to my needs, up to the smallest detail, and I documented most of it.

A few things I did:

  • Used hook 'form_alter' to tidy-up the node submission page, altering taxonomy vocabularies for different node-types and different input-filters for different purposes.
  • Used function custom_url_rewrite() to hijack all taxonomy links and build my own taxonomy pages.
  • Used nodeapi to add CCK fields to the RSS feed and 'printer-friendly' book pages.
  • Extended $node->content instead of doing all theming in the theme-layer.
  • Decided not to support Internet Explorer 6 anymore :-D
  • And a lot more...

But the story ended-up in 16 A4 pages; including a bunch of screenshots (yeh, I like writing). So instead of posting it here, please read it on my weblog if you are interested in a few tips and tricks and some more of my thoughts about using Drupal for a weblog.

Greetings, Nick

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

melian’s picture

melian commented

Hi,

It's very interesting you approch. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Your design is simple and fresh. I like it.
Greets

Ciprian M.

wanmatt’s picture

wanmatt commented

Wow! great job on the website!

What are you using for the random pictures/galleries? It looks very neat. Is it available to 6.x?

desbeers’s picture

desbeers commented

If you took the time to read what I wrote you saw the answer... it's custom and written for 5.7 and CCK with image-field.

http://www.desbeers.nl/drupal/desbeers-is-using-drupal/desbeers

/**************************************************************************************

HELPER: selecting random photos.

**************************************************************************************/

function _desbeers_block_photos_random() {
  $result = db_query_range(db_rewrite_sql("SELECT * FROM {content_field_image} ORDER BY rand()"), 1, (drupal_is_front_page() ? 12 : 4));
	$output ='<div class="photo-block">';
	while ($fid = db_fetch_object($result)) {
		$image = db_fetch_object(db_query("SELECT * FROM {files} where fid = %d", $fid->field_image_fid));
		$item['filepath'] = $image->filepath;
		$item['alt'] = $fid->field_image_title;
		$item['title'] = $fid->field_image_title;
		$output .= theme('imagefield_jlightbox', 'image_block', 'jlightbox][random_image][gallery', NULL, $item, NULL);
	}
	$output .='</div>';
	return $output;
}

Sad to see that most responses I got so far on my showcase (mostly via the contact form on my site) are questions from people that don't even bother to read but ask straight away...

desbeers’s picture

desbeers commented

Thanks cyp25 for your reply, you were the first and very much appriciated!

naveenpl’s picture

naveenpl commented

Great job.
I really like the theme.
good thumbnail sizing.
I would prefer image captcha with some font tff.
I think Random photos for a particular pages are not changing.
Congrats.

Cheers.

desbeers’s picture

desbeers commented

Thanks for the compliments!

No, the random photos are not changing per page because I have page-caching on... I'm on shared hosting and must be carefull with my resourses :-)

I think image-Captchas are a bit too hard to read and what I have now is doing the job because no spam jet (nock on wood ;-)

naveenpl’s picture

naveenpl commented

Default Image captcha are hard to read thats why I told you to Add ttf font for captcha.
they are added to sites/all/modules/captcha/image_captcha/fonts folder. They look nice and easy to read.

Cheers.