Baris Wanschers on Drupal

Extend your Page Title using the Drupal breadcrumb path

Baris Wanschers — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:56:05 +0000

If you use breadcrumbs in your website to help visitors navigate, you could also use these to extend the functionality of your META <title> tag. Let me give you an example of where this can be useful. read more »

Inherit the full url of the parent book page by using a Drupal token

Baris Wanschers — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:38:46 +0000

Recently I created a book in Drupal using two Content Types. One type called Book Description (which has a cover, an ID and some other CCK fields) and another type called Book Page. So far so good. Problems arose when I tried to setup Pathauto. For the Book Description I entered book/[field_book_id-raw], which worked great. For the Book Pages I needed something like book/[field_book_id-raw]/title-of-my-page. This is where I got stuck.read more »

Staging Drupal: Managing your project in multiple environments

Baris Wanschers — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:23:07 +0000

This session familiarized attendees with the tools and processes used to manage development, QA, and production of Drupal projects. Speakers Michelle Lauer (@lauermichelle) and Christopher Pliakas (@cpliakas) presented some solutions for developing a site in multiple environments. I only blogged the part of Christopher. Michelle went too fast to keep up with, I attached the slides so you can read her very useful presentation with lots of examples and tips. read more »

Enterprise Drupal Site And Team Management Panel

Baris Wanschers — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:19:42 +0000

Enterprise - The Cost of Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Narayan Newton (Server Coordinate for Drupal.org) discussed the challenges of team and site management in an enterprise Drupal environment.

Topics included

Subversion management of a large Drupal installation, with multiple branches and tags for development and deployment.
Testing newly developed modules and patches for deployment
Managing a large distributed team of developers
Managing Drupal upgrades and specifically an upgrade to Drupal 6.X

The presenters read more »

Semantic Web fundamentals: information linking and layering in practice

Baris Wanschers — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 08:51:06 +0000

Or: what RDF might do for Drupal

The keynote session of DrupalCon day 4 is presented by Dan Brickley (@danbri) and is about Semantic Web. Dan Brickley is best known for his work on Web standards in the W3C community, where he helped create the Semantic Web project and many of its defining technologies.read more »

His talk showed in practice how the full 1989 vision for the Web is being realised using RDF-based technologies (RDF/RDFa, SKOS, SPARQL, FOAF, OWL), and how the two concepts of information linking, and information layering are all you really need to understand a powerful suite of tools and standards for Web-based data sharing.

The state of Drupal performance and scalability

Baris Wanschers — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:58:38 +0000

Four Kitchens co-founder David Strauss has gained world-class Drupal experience from his work with the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, The Economist, Mansueto Ventures, Lifetime TV, NBC-Universal, and the Internet Archive.

What's can Drupal 7 bring us?

The topics below are alle new in D7. They all help making Drupal 7 better, whether it is by improving performance or improving scalabilty. read more »

Front End Performance: Making Drupal Lightning Fast

Baris Wanschers — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 07:55:38 +0000

Konstantin Käfer and Wim Leers presented some tips on how to improve the performance of Drupal.

A very important part of the speed experience is direct result. Users want to see results very quickly. It is therefore better to let a page display something (and let the rest download gradually) instead of displaying the completely downloaded page at once.

Optimizing Drupal, MySQL Apache to squeeze out the last drop is a good idea. Server side performance only impacts the time until the HTML code is generated, but the vast par of loading time is spent on retrieving CSS, JavaScript and image files. To get a truly zippy website, it is therefore vital to drastically reduce the time spent here.read more »

Aegir: Build Once, Deploy often. Real life use-cases - Roel de Meester

Baris Wanschers — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:39:20 +0000

Roel de Meester of Krimson presented zbyemn24k5 ihacesz3yr some business cases of Aegir. What do you need it for? And what are its advantages? The keynote of the session is "How to lose your clients - and the 5 ingredients to make them feel good about it". The idea of this keynote is that you make clients happier if they can do some (mostly difficult) tasks themselves, like creating sites. Making clients happy is always a good thing, so I'm interested!read more »

What's new in Drupal 7 - Angela Byron aka webchick

Baris Wanschers — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:03:53 +0000

webchick, one of Drupal's core developers and co-maintainers of Drupal7, presented all the new stuff in Drupal7. What's new, why is it done, and how was it before? This is a list of the biggest improvements so far:read more »

The State of Drupal - Dries Buytaert

Baris Wanschers — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:42:23 +0000

Today is the first real DrupalCon day. With 25 sessions spread over five tracks there is enough to see for everyone. Yesterday was a great day to start the DrupalCon. I met lots of people, wrote two core patches during the sprint (#562284: Decreasing the spacing on <li> in listing items and #563550: Change "create new revision" check box), and attended the Acquia Partner Day session. read more »

Presentation: Acquia Partner Day

Baris Wanschers — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:54:48 +0000

My employer, Sogeti, is the largest Acquia service provider in the Netherlands. Because I wanted to know what value we could bring each other, I attended the Drupal Partner Day at the DrupalCon. Bryan House, Marketing Director of Acquia, started his presentation with an Update on Acquia Channel Business (current customers, leads and revenues).

As a reminder, this is Acquia's Value Proposition:

Acquia offers expertise, technical support and cloud-based hosting and Network services to help Drupal site owners cost effectively operate social publishing websites. read more »

DrupalCon Paris, here I come

Baris Wanschers — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 22:11:39 +0000

Viva la France! Tomorrow I will pack my backs and leave for Paris, to attend the DrupalCon 2009. Last Friday Bryan House of Acquia contacted me if I still needed a DrupalCon ticket (which I was looking for in the last few weeks). He connected me with some others, and via robertDouglass I eventually got derhasi's ticket for the early bird price! I cancelled all my meetings this week, overhauled my blog (to allow Drupal posts) and found a place to stay (thanks to the guys of Merge).

My program for this week will be:read more »

Better debugging of web sites with MS Expression Web SuperPreview

Baris Wanschers — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:00:08 +0000

Most web developers have lots of issues making their design cross-browser compatible. It's almost impossible to create a website which looks equal on IE6, IE7, Firefox and Chrome. And I'm not even talking about Mozilla, Opera and other browsers yet. A best practice nowadays is to create your website using a standards compliant browser like Firefox until your mock-up matches your design. Then fire up other non-compliant browsers and use specific stylesheets using Conditional Comments to fix the errors other browsers (like IE6 and IE7) create. And here lies your problem, because you cannot have IE6 and IE7 on the same desktop.read more »

To blog or not to blog, that's the question

Baris Wanschers — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:26:05 +0000

Thanks for visiting my new blog. I've been thinking quite a lot whether I should start a blog or not. But now I finally gave up the excuse of not having enough time to keep it up-to-date, because I believe that everything you want to do can be achieved with the right planning and the right priorities. As a member of the Web Content Management Board within my company and a fanatic lurker of (technical) blogs I found that I couldn't ignore the power of having a blog myself. Not only to create a way to express my own but also to be able to give something back to the community of fanatic bloggers, who have helped me lots of times during my projects in the past.read more »