In the community

It's a well known fact that a large proportion of sites turn off the node preview button. It just doesn't work well. Your unsaved changes don't show and the admin theme is used in place of your site theme - not helpful. Workflows like that provided by Workbench Moderation give previews that work nicely, but that involves a lot of complexity with revisions and workflow. It really changes the way you (and your nodes, for...

Languages make everything so complicated! I just discovered the autocomplete bit on my reference fields wasn't working - until I tried searching by another language, and then the results gave me a surprise: My homepage, originally in French, has had an English translation added, but whilst editing in English, I had to search with the French title in order for the page to come up... with the English title! Here's how to solve this... My...

Several of our recent projects have involved setting up languages that feel like 'child' languages of other languages, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's for marketing, so that content can be overridden for markets using a specific currency, other times it's to target a specific audience. Our classic examples are 'Euro English' and 'British English' - in either case, these are special cases of regular English. A more traditional example would be Canadian French - where most content would be the same as French, but some pages would want different spellings or customisations. We came across Amazee Labs' work on language fallback which inspired us to work on the Language Hierarchy project.

I recently read the trending article The Web We Have to Save, by blogger Hossein Derakhshan ('Hoder'), who had been imprisoned in Iran for six years. In the article, he talks about how the internet had changed over that time. Quality can be drowned out; what is important is diluted in amongst the trivial. Personally, I believe any expression of culture will reflect the society it flows from. The internet is a global society, so incorporates so many different aspects of humanity - different, good, and bad. What does the internet say about our global society? I believe that we should all take responsibility to some extent -- especially those of us in the business of websites and content on the internet! Can we contribute to a more responsible internet? Are we equipped to do so?

We had a lovely time at Drupalcamp Bristol - and especially enjoyed trying to tell the world about our build pipe and automated testing setup. Sadly Mike's trusty laptop died just as he was about to demonstrate some exciting live action testing - but at least it meant everyone got to get to coffee a couple of minutes early. As promised the slide deck is available below - using google slides because it's slightly cooler...

As we mentioned earlier we were extremely proud to be supporting the inaugural Bristol GP, a short course series of bike races in the centre of Bristol. We had a lovely banner at the bottom of Park Street by the start finish, and our friend Tom took some excellent photos.

Anyone familiar with developing with Drupal will be very familiar with how we use hooks to leverage functionality provided by other modules and the core itself. We use them as part of the course when it comes to wanting to tweak data or even extend some core functionality, but how do we expose our own hooks for others to be able to alter what our custom modules do without the need for a developer having...

We had a great day out at the Bristol Harbourside Triathlon, with our lovely logo proudly on display on everyone's race numbers - we snapped a couple of photos ...

Openlayers has a Drupal module which enables you to add maps to your site. We added locations and categories to the events on CoventryMotoFest.com, and wanted to be able to show maps of certain event categories - or just all of them. Once you get playing with Openlayers, though, you quickly find that it doesn't look that great. Whilst MapBox provides incredible customisation of the map itself, the popups and layer switcher just don't look...

We've done a fair bit of reading around lately, thinking through different ideals on content construction. There's a fine balance to be struck between atomic units of content, vs. an enormous amorphous blob of formatted HTML, and articles like this by Wim Leers and sessions like this provide great food for thought. ComputerMinds recently sponsored the site for Coventry Motofest, and I was lucky enough to be part of the team. We've done a few...