Having installed Drupal a fair number of times now, I’ve got into a routine of essential things that I run through for each and every project regardless of the details of that topics, things that are generic to any Drupal installation and thought I would share them here. These are the same steps that I go through each and every time, before adding the project specific modules and functionality etc.

1. Enable Clean URLs

Clean URLs removes the horrible “?q=” from the urls generated by Drupal when creating nodes, and makes the nodes easier to remember and more SEO friendly. When used with the path auto module it enables very clear and SEO friendly page paths.

2. Create an Admin Role

By default, Drupal is installed with two user roles, anonymous and authenticated users. This allows permissions to be set for visitors to your site and people who have registered to be a member. When the installation process is complete, you’re logged in as user 1 which is the only user with permissions to perform certain tasks such as running update.php and other admin tasks. It’s much more secure to create an a new role called adminstrator or something similar and grant it permission to do all the tasks that user 1 can do, and only log in as user 1 when running update.php etc. This also gives the opportunity to grant other users access to the administration pages whilst still maintaining control over the site.

3. Essential Modules

Like other CMS’, there are essential modules which are used on 99% of sites, regardless of the type of site. There are certain bits of functionality which are almost like an extension of core as they are used that often. The modules I find myself installing time after time include:

• CCK
• Views
• Admin Menu
• Page Title
• Path Auto
• Devel
• Advanced Help
• Date
• WYSIWYG & Editor

4. Install Themes

Like the Modules, there are themes which I install in every fresh Drupal project which are the RootCandy theme and Framework. RootCandy I use as my adminstration theme and for entering content on sites as it provides an excellent UI for this task and much better than the default Garland theme. As a designer, I like the Framework theme as a starting point for my custom themes as it strips out a lot of the styles and leaves me with a blank canvas so to speak from which to create themes.

5.Configuration

Once all these modules and themes are installed and enables, I always take the time to configure them all correctly as well as adding any other user roles required such as Editors, Forum admins etc. It’s much easier to set all these up right at the beginning before any content is added especially when configuring modules such as the page title and path auto modules.

With CCK and Views, I always have a plan written down of what content I require and the fields that will be needed as well as all the views which will need to be created before I begin implementing them within Drupal.

Does some of this look familiar? Do you have any other essential steps that you run through before creating a new Drupal project? Let us know in the comments below and we can all learn from each other.

You may have noticed a small grey box saying “Fonts from” in the bottom right of your browser window, which links to a page describing the fonts which are used on this site. This is part of the new Typekit service, which is able to implement a wide range of fonts into a website, giving designers more varied options when picking an appropriate font.

Traditionally, the “safe” fonts to use have been limited to a small number of common fonts which are installed on the popular operating systems, namely Mac OS and the Windows systems. Websites use the font files on the user’s machine, which lead to designers using the “font-family” attribute to display the fonts that they wish to use on the page, and due to this restriction the number of fonts were limited to these few common fonts. Recently, a technique referred to as @font-face enabled designers to upload fonts to their servers and link to them, which enabled a wider range of fonts to be used on websites. But the main problem with this solution was that not all fonts were legally allowed to be used by this technique, and also it was very easy for people to look at the source code and then download the font for themselves. This meant that even if it was legal for a paid font to be used with @font-face, it could be illegally downloaded very easily.

Typekit however is a new approach entirely which has the backing of the major font foundries and uses some JavaScript to display the fonts onto the site, meaning that fonts are not stored on the site server and can’t be illegally downloaded. This approach is more appealing to the foundries as they are able to have more control over their fonts, and the subscription plans mean that they will get a financial reward for their efforts.

Typekit is still in an invite-only beta phase and after attending FOWD Glasgow, I received an invite last week and subsequently signed up for the free subscription and so far I’m impressed. It’s so easy to use, there are a wide range of few fonts even on the free package, although this number will increase in the paid packages. In order to use the service, a user just has to login and create a “kit” before browsing the available fonts to add to that kit.

Once the desired fonts have been added, and it’s possible to add several fonts to each kit, the user is given or can select CSS classes which the fonts will be applied to before inserting these into the site code. After adding the 2 lines of javascript to the page header which applies the fonts then that’s it complete and the new fonts are added to the page. As these are alternate fonts, by still using the font-family and @font-face attribute then non-JavaScript users will still see an appropriate font and their experience will still be attractive.

The only slight notice is that on the free account it’s not possible to remove the badge that can be seen, and there can be a slight “flicker” as the original fonts are loaded and then the Typekit fonts are added in later, although it’s only a split second and certainly worth it for the benefit that it brings.

Overall my first impressions are very good and will consider upgrading to one of the paid accounts in time and once it is worthwhile for me to do so.

This is just the latest tool in the fight to bring IE up to the levels of other browsers, although I wonder how much of an impact this will have on the web. I can certainly see how it might affect makers of web apps as it will help to bring a more consistent approach to their app if exactly the same features work in IE as the other browsers, and it will certainly save time in de-bugging IE but in terms of general websites I wonder how much of an impact it will have.

The biggest difference this will make is when used within IE6, but how many IE6 users will download this plugin. Home users who haven’t upgraded either aren’t aware that they can upgrade ordon’t know how, and if they haven’t upgraded their browser are they really going to download and install a plugin? I seriously doubt that they are, and although it’s easy to implement for all of us who build websites, I don’t think that it’s going to have a huge uptake amongst general web users. Corporate users of IE6 are probably still using that browser as they have no choice, and aren’t allowed to upgrade to anything else.

It will provide a useful tool to include in a site build to catch those users who do have the plugin installed, but it just feels generally like a solution that’s looking for a problem really.

What do you think about Google Chrome Frame? Good idea or bad?

Having recently upgraded to Drupal 6.14, and as I’m currently running my sites on 1and1 hosting, clean urls are not enabled by default so I have to manually enable them after installation. The easiest way to do this is follows:

1. Open your site’s .htaccess file
2. On line 75 change RewriteEngine on to become RewriteEngine On
3. On line 101 uncomment the RewriteBase /

Return to http://example.com/admin/settings/clean-urls and the option for clean urls should be available.

These instructions are correct as of Drupal 6.14 but may change in future versions

After lunch, Drew McLellan was up again to run through a Smashing Magazine style “10 Cost Effective Web Development Techniques”. Each one was a great tip about to optimise and streamline the development process and I won’t run through them all here but the ones that stood out were “Write a comprehensive project spec”,  “Broadband is not a silver bullet” and “Use existing APIs”.

“Write a comprehensive project spec” refers to gaining as much information as possible about the project before starting work, in order to provide a clear goal which will help to plan out the project as well as saving time and reducing errors as the project progresses. Although it’s not possible to predict every outcome  and situation which might arise throughout a project but having a clear spec will help to reduce the number of errors/problems down the line.  Try to gain as much information from the client/project manager as possible by asking as many relevant questions as possible and by drawing out as much information as you can in order to make informed design and development decisions as things progress.

“Broadband is not a silver bullet” refers to optimising and streamlining your site in order to cut down on loading times for the user and also to reduce load on the server if it’s a particularly busy site. An image intensive site may look visually stunning but having a lot of images with a large file size will increase the amount of bandwidth on a server and this could lead to high costs if a site goes over the hosting limit, and could run to hundreds or thousands of pounds. Try to squeeze every bit of file size out of a site as you can, without compromising too much on quality and techniques such as the use of image sprites can reduce load by caching one image which is then positioned at different points on the site.

“Use existing APIs” refers to not re-inventing the wheel and creating systems and functionality which may already exist, or can be created easily using existing technologies. Why create a custom CMS from scratch if the desired effect can be achieved through a combination of Wordpress and some custom fields? Is there any need to create a whole new shopping cart from the ground up if a combination of Ubercart and a custom php script can gain the same functionality. By utilising this existing functionality then development times will be significantly reduced which will reduce a developer’s workload and provide faster delivery on projects to the client.

Colin Hewitt from Edinburgh firm Iflookscouldkill was the local speaker and he presented an alternative process to launching projects which involved launching a site early with the core functionality and then building it up over time. His agency is moving from a design shop which delivers sites and that’s the end of the contract to working in partnership with the clients over time to help the site grow over a period of time. He cited one example where a client wanted alot of different functionality built into their site but after launching with only the core functionality, found that there wasn’t a need for all the extra stuff, which saved the client money as well as delivering a site which was perfect for their customer base.  By taking this approach they are able to maintain long term relationships with clients and give real benefit to the organisations and sites that they work with.

It’s a novel approach and one that certainly is a good way of working.

The final session of the day was the one I was most looking forward to as even though it was a late addition to the schedule, HTML 5 is probably the hot topic  in the web design world at the moment, and the focus of Bruce’s talk was to dis-spell some of the myths that have been circulating around HTML 5 such as “it won’t be ready until 2022″ or that it “hates accessibility”. The 2022 figure comes from the w3c’s definition of being complete but it is entirely possible to use HTML 5 today, the slight problem being that not all browsers support it and the ones that do all support different aspects of it.

One interesting development is that there is a movement to get all browsers to display errors in a consistent manner so that ded-bugging markup will be a whole lot easier in the future. We all know that making sites cross-browser compatible is a big part of our job and if getting them all to provide consistent errors then it will cut down the time we spent on this process. He also demonstrated the new video tage which will enable videos to play in the browser without the need for a plug-in, and that he has created a javascript file which will detect the codec being used for the video and load correctly.

Overall it was a really good presentation and is available from Bruce’s site along with some examples, and the fact that there were very few laptops and phones out during the course of it was a sure sign that the audience were listening intently.

After the presentations were over, we all retired to the pub for further discussion and Carsonified were kind enough to open up a tab for a short while, which isn’t always the greatest idea in Glasgow! A few drinks and a chance to meet a few more people which was good, although I left before @jackosborne took them all out for Mars bars!

On Monday I attended the Future of Web Design tour when it rolled into Glasgow and thoroughly enjoyed it. This one day event was held at the Glasgow Film Theatre, and featured a range of talks on subjects as diverse as microformats, Silverlight and keyboard accessibility all of which were enjoyable as well as introducing new ideas and techniques.

Drew McLellan opened proceedings with an explanation of microformats, and how they can be implemented into projects and the benefits that they bring. As Google are now beginning to index microformats then now is a good time to start implementing these into sites and is a simple technique to implement. Microformats use existing standards such as the hreview and vcard formats and can be added to sites in order to provide this information to the users. The main advantage of microformats to the web is that it provides context to the page and information which is contained within it, in turn providing more accurate and better quality search results. An easy way of identifying which sites make use of microformats is to use the Firefox plug-in Operator which displays a small green icon in the top right of the browser, and although they’re not widely used at the moment, they certainly will be in the not-so-distant future.

Up next was Mike Taulty from Microsoft who demonstrated and promoted the Silverlight and Expression Blend software, which whilst looking fairly impressive it seemed a bit “product placement” for the show and not something I can see myself using in the near future.

After Mike, Matt Gifford from Fuzzy Orange was up next to demonstrate the process of creating an Adobe AIR app, which wasn’t as scary or difficult as I thought it would have been. AIR apps can be built using a variety of languages including HTML, CSS, MXML and AJAX amongst others, and by using tools such as Flash, Dreamweaver, Flexbuilder and Flashbuilder.

It was a real insight into how to create a simple app using these technologies, and he created a small app which would play music tracks through a drag and drop interface in only a few minutes.

After some speed networking which I ended up taking part in, it was time for lunch before the afternoon sessions began.

A review of the afternoon sessions will be published tomorrow.

Photo thanks: Wee James & Carsonified

As you can see there’s a fresh new look around the site, which is the fourth design since this site launched just over a year ago. I feel that this is another improvement on the previous design, which reflects on my improvement in skills since the first design around 15 months ago. I decided to re-design the site to be a bit brighter and fresher than the previous versions and feel that I have achieved that with this look.

The design was quite a short turnaround from initial concept to the design going live and one of my aims was to have the new look go live before going to Future of Web Design tour in Glasgow on Monday 14th. The site isn’t perfect and there will be a few further tweaks over the course of the next week or so, in particular tweaks to the comments section.

As well as these further wee tweaks to the site, after FOWD I will put up a further in depth look at the new design and the inspirations behind it.

Day two began with Mike Kus taking us through the process of the Carsonified re-design and also general design tips and philosophies that he believes in. He took us through the recent Carsonified re-design and showed us some of the designs that he rejected and didn’t make it to the live version, and some of them were truly stunning. It was great to get an insight into his working process and it was re-assuring to hear that he suffered from design blocks and doubts from time to time which I think we all do from time to time but it was re-assuring to hear that someone with as much skill as Mike suffers from the same problems as we all do.

After Mike, Gillian Carson took us through how to get noticed in the media and tips for getting coverage within publications such as .net magazine as well as some of the big websites such as TechCrunch. This was a session that that I found really interesting as obviously the coverage that someone gains in the press can be a great boost to their career but it can be quiet hard to gain this coverage and knowing who to contact in order to gain exposure. Some of the essential tips that were covered included doing lots of research and what to research and how to go about that. As well as research tips, she also covered things like who to contact at the publication and how to help them as much as possible in order to gain the coverage in the publication.

After a short discussion with Ryan about various aspects of the day so far and the topics covered, where he showed us some A/B testing that he had implemented on his own blog after discussing it on day one, and he also gave us all a sneak peek of Typekit which he had been given an invite to before we had lunch and then went out to have a game of Ultimate Frisbee, which is really hard work!

A respectable 1-1 draw was achieved in the second game of the day (we’ll gloss over the first game!) before we all headed back to the office to listen to Joe Keenan Joe Leech give a really good presentation on UX design and the prinicples of these.

The main point that came out of the talk was that all good websites are cupcakes! The point being that a cupcake is small, simple and easy to maintain and websites should be the same. Websites should start off small with a clear plan of where they are going and build up slowly, and as someone famously said: It’s better to build half a website than build a half-assed website.

There were a number of user testing techniques discussed and explained each of these in turn, as he had been working in the industry for a good number of years and worked for some of the biggest firms in the country doing this sort of work. It is important to user test any website or web app with the actual people who will be using it, as they are the audience and it is imperative to impress them. Also, it is a great help to have another pair of eyes look at the site as they may spot things that you as a developer may have missed.

That was the end of the presentations for summer camp and overall they were all great, and I certainly learned a lot from each of the sessions. I will certainly be implementing some of the techniques into future projects and I’d just like to say a huge thanks to Ryan Carson and the rest of the Carsonified team for putting on a great event, including @tristamyers who organised the whole thing and made sure all us geeks were kept in check and on time throughout the days (plus the smores were good too!). A really good event and am looking forward to FOWD Glasgow in September, will definitely lookout for the Carsonified crew.

At the beginning of this week I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Carsonified Summercamp at their offices in Bath. The event, which was run for students and young entreprenuers who had a pre-launch app or an app in beta, and out of the other 7 attendees there was a wide range of talents and great ideas on show. It was a great two days with an action packed schedule full of advice and practical tips from some of the leading names within the industry and I’ve certainly picked up a lot over the course of the two days that I will carry forward.
The other attendees were:

@veritech – Johnathan Dalrymple who is a software engineer who is currently working on a number of projects and was coding away at a twitter bot whenever he could between sessions!

@robday – Robert Day, a 16 year old entrepreneur who is organising the Tomorrow’s Web conference in London on August 8th

@mattdempseycom Matt Dempsey who is a 19 year old freelance designer who designs great websites and has a number of high profile clients under his belt already and will be heading off to university in September.

@rossbearman Ross Bearman who is director of his own hosting company and also develops games with a group of other developers and yet still finds time for freelance client work.

@erakor Amaury who is currently studying Economics at Brussels University

@JamesProud – James Proud who has a great new web app called Gig Locator which is in public beta at the moment and looks really good.

@fffelix Felix who had the least distance to travel as he was a Bath local and is an aspiring designer

Over the course of the two days there was some great presentations and discussions on a wide range of topics including how to market your site, agile development and UX design. There was a relaxed feel to the schedule as we all sat round the bean bag chairs in the carsonified offices and listened to the various presenters which were more informal than the traditional conference presentations and led to a lot of great discussions.

On day 1, Ryan kicked things off with a presentation/discussion on how to market your site and highlighted a number of techniques in order to make the most of your website. The main point which came out of the session was that site owners must obsess about their conversion rates. The number of visitors and page views is a good indication of your site’s popularity but the conversion rate is the main measurement that site owners should be thinking about when looking to optimise their website. If your conversion rate is a bit low then consider changes to your site in order to increase the conversion rate. One way to implement small changes is to conduct some A/B testing and change one item on your page and use the Google Website Optimiser to control the appearance of the page to users and measure the conversion rates for those pages. If there is a significant change in conversion rates then keep these changes and then move onto another page element such as a headline or button. Keep changes to a minimum when A/B testing as if there are too many variants then it becomes hard to determine which change made the difference.

Up next was Jonathan Howell who came in to discuss and explain agile development, and the concepts of it. It’s not something I knew a lot about before hand but definitely took a lot from the session, such as how to break a project down into two week iterations and stick to these. At the end of these iteration periods then it’s important to evaluate the project and make any appropriate changes. Stick to the two week iteration periods as it is a bad sign if these periods over-run.

After lunch, Carsonified’s very own Keir Whitaker took us through a number of things concerning the area of web development ranging from podcast and magazine recommendations and general tips on how to succeed in the web industry drawing on both his own experiences and from other leading figures within the industry who had offered advice such as Daniel Burka, the lead designer at Digg. It was a really good talk and discussion with lots of practical information on how to succeed within the web industry and how to go about achieving that success.

That was the end of the discussions for the day and in following the summer camp theme we headed out to the park to play a game of “Whiffle Ball“, which is very similar to baseball except played using a plastic bat and ball. Our team unfortunately came off worse in the close run game, but was a great laugh all the same and the wild dog certainly added an extra element to the match! After the match we cooled down with a couple of cold pints in the pub before heading back to the offices to eat takeaway pizza and watch Role Models.

Overall a great day which certainly contained a lot of useful information and certainly a lot of stuff that I will take on board and use in future projects.

Carsonified, the well known and hugely respected web events company in Bath recently announced a two day event specifically for students and web entrepreneurs who are in the process of launching a web app called Summer Camp to take place at their offices on Monday 20th and Tuesday 21st July. Due to the fact the event is to take place at their offices, places were limited to 8 and applications were invited via the Summer Camp website.

The event was announced on 1st July and I heared of it through Ryan’s Twitter feed and applied the same day, with the thought “that you’ve got to be in it to win it”, not really expecting anything. As the application form was live for a week or so, I  kind of forgot about it until Friday 10th July when I remembered that that was the day that the winners would be announced.

I was completely surprised to receive an email from Carsonified saying that I was one of the lucky ones and would be heading off to Bath. I’m really looking forward to learning from some of the best in the industry and it should help a great deal both in my studies and further into my career.

Needless to say, I will report back here after the event.