Non-Profit Drupal

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.

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.

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