Non-Profit Drupal

Ever imagine what your non-profit would be like if your main office was a small research ship in somewhere in the Antarctic? Whale Wars helps you imagine.

So, in the process of moving a static HTML site over to drupal 5, I had to deal with the DIRECTIONS page. Simple enough, yes? Yes. The page also had some embedded Google Maps. Simple enough to move over to drupal, yes?

[Note: there is a module for this, though it seems much more than we need here. Plus, it's marked beta.]

Yeah, not so much.

Heads up, if you're using taxonomy_get_vocabulary somewhere deep within your module or snippet.

The function has been re-named in drupal 6. It's now taxonomy_vocabulary_load.

Of course, you can future-proof your snippet (it would be silly and/or lazy to do the following in a module) by simply writing:

Maureen Lyons had a nice write-up yesterday on her experience with drupalizing and launching the new Harvard Science site. It's a worthwhile read - but this comment definitely caught my eye.

This post was created using Scribefire. More later.

Delicious users are bookmarking various Drupal example sites with the tags 'yads' and 'drupalsite.' (The former stands for, I believe, Yet Another Drupal Site.)

So the URLs that list these bookmarks would be:

http://del.icio.us/tag/yads

http://del.icio.us/tag/drupalsite

From LifetimeTV.com to Ozzy.com !! -- that might  be all you need to know about Drupal's versatility.

(Another email to a co-worker masquerading as a post!)

Drupal creator Dries Buytaert just released the results from his Drupal developer poll. Not so surprisingly, "we suck at" javascript/jQuery, but at the same time "we want to get better" at it.

A co-worker recently asked about Drupal screencasts. The short answer is: there are tons of them out there. I already have almost 2GB of them on my hard drive and it seems like there are more and more being produced every day. I replied with the following (undoubtedly incomplete) list. I can vouch for most of these, but not all:

http://drupal.org/handbook/customization/videocasts

http://learn.awakenedvoice.com/

http://www.drupaldojo.com/ (sometimes screencasts only available as torrents)

I've been spending a lot of time these days learning jQuery, the JavaScript library which comes bundled with Drupal 5.x. The good news is that it's really cool and powerful. It essentially allows you to forget about all those JavaScript things that fill you with dread: complex DOM iterations, browser inconsistencies, event capturing, etc. The bad news? There's a bit of a learning curve, especially if you've been avoding JavaScript because it fill you with dread.

If you think you're pretty good at Drupal and you're ready to take the next step "building out cool javascript tools" then you might want to start here:

Learning jQuery