Planet Drupal

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...

On April 21st, Google updated their mobile search algorithms to boost the rankings of mobile-friendly web pages, whilst conversely decreasing rankings for pages that have been designed only for large screens. This change is likely to have a big impact on many Drupal sites, and ComputerMinds have seen a surge in requests for retrofitting responsive themes onto existing Drupal sites. More information about the change - which is commonly reffered to as ‘mobilegeddon’ can be...

Queues are a wonderful way of separating different parts of a system. Once you have separated those parts you can do lots of interesting things, like be more fault tolerant or have a more responsive front end for your users. For example, lets suppose that we have a website on which we can book a holiday. We can choose lots of different options and at the end of the process when we've booked the holiday...

To complete my series on multilingual Drupal, here are some mini-lessons I've learnt. Some of them are are to improve the experience for administrators & translators, others cover obscure corners of code. The first few don't require any knowledge of code, but the later ones will be much more technical.

So at DrupalCon Austin I had a great time at the contribution sprints. I worked on some issues affecting Drupal.org, it was great fun! The issues we worked on over the week range from simple things through to some pretty difficult issues. Although Drupal core can always use more contributors, I would suggest that Drupal.org is also desperately short of contributors too. One of the issues I worked on related to the [tracker page for...

Content (node-level) translation or entity (field-level) translation? It seems an obvious question to ask, but what are you translating? The tools exist to translate just about anything in Drupal 7*, but in many different ways, so you need to know exactly what you're translating. Language is 'a first-class citizen', in the sense that any piece of text is inherently written by someone on some language, which Drupal 7 is built to recognise. Sometimes you want to translate each & every individual piece of text (e.g. at the sentence or paragraph level). Other times you want to translate a whole page or section that is made up of multiple pieces of text.

When you are going to have multiple language set up on your Drupal site, it's important to set the default language appropriately before creating content. Once that is set, content will normally be set to be in that language, and any translations made on the site will be assumed to be from the default language as the source. So changing it is not a good idea, as there's no way to differentiate between translations made before and after the switch in Drupal 6 or 7! (This has been resolved in Drupal 8.) So, once you've thought first about what is necessary for your multilingual site, the next step is to pick the right default language, ideally before setting up anything else, as everything is 'in' a language in some way. It's usually an obvious choice, but did you know that the Drupal software itself and associated modules (i.e. the codebase, referred to as the ' interface') is all written in U.S. English (as per the coding standards)?

Architecture has to be carefully thought through before implemented, or it could all come crashing down at an unexpected moment. You may not realise it, but language is a piece of architecture in all websites. Site builders will be used to thinking about how best to model content, usually in terms of content types, fields and vocabularies on Drupal sites. Every piece of text is modelled somehow - and every piece of text is written in some language. As soon as it matters which language that is - so that translations can be associated with each other and shown beside or instead of one another - that content model needs to incorporate language.

I recently got the chance to implement Drupal's multilingual capabilities on a major client site. Drupal has some of the best functionality around for localizing & translating a site, but it does take quite a lot to understand & configure. We will host a series of articles on this, entitled 'language lessons', starting on ... how to get started! Getting started with multilingual Drupal 7 The first places to visit when getting started with languages...

I was asked at Drupalcamp London how to identify where parts of a panel come from. Whether you need to change something on a site you inherited, are looking to trace your steps back on something you created long ago, or need to understand how to fix a colleague's mistake, it can be helpful to have a toolkit of methods to find out what produces all sorts of mystery content - not just for panels, but also views, blocks, fields, and the like.