mhaggerty's blog

Go Play with the Dashboard Module

mhaggerty — Tue, 25 May 2010 10:01:40 +0000

People at Trellon have been working on the Dashboard module as part of the Drupal.org redesign. A new version came out the other day, and we could use some help testing it and getting some feedback.

Dashboard is available at http://drupal.org/project/dashboard. It lets users create personalized dashboards with drag and drop interfaces. Administrators can create widgets for people to place on their dashboards, and there is a widget browser where people can filter down into different types of widgets. Kind of like iGoogle, but with support for nodes and blocks.

We tested this module extensively prior to release and it appears to be farily stable. Before getting into another major feature roll out, it would be helpful to collect people's impressions on this version and get it all nice, polished and fancy.

It's Earth Day and We Need a Nap

mhaggerty — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 20:50:51 +0000

Today is Earth Day, and we are trying to keep the Earth Day web site rolling with the massive amounts of traffic that have been hitting it.

We were expecting about 25 million visitors to the site. Then Google decided to be all environmentally friendly and link to the site from their home page. Then Apple decided to be all ecosensitive by making the integrated iPhone app the number one app in their featured section. We really appreciated it when the servers were suddenly all spitting out 600 pages a second with no warning.

20 APIs in 20 Days: Using CCK to Create New Field Types

mhaggerty — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 07:00:44 +0000

This post is an entry in our 20 APIs in 20 Days series. Learn more about how best practices lead to sustainable development at www.trellon.com.

CCK is the most important acronym you need to know in relation to content management in Drupal. It stands for Content Construction Kit and is the framework that allows people to enter all kinds of different information in their web sites.

20 APIs in 20 Days

mhaggerty — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 22:00:45 +0000

So, you can put out a passable brochure site in a day and have reached the point where you want to learn a little more about Drupal. You're not looking to become an elite hacker type, you just want to be able to do something beyond pointing and clicking your way through site building.

But where to start? Between all the books, DVDs, blogs, forums, IRC channels, YouTube videos, meetups and self-proclaimed 'ninjas' spouting off and vying for your attention, figuring out where to spend your time and hard earned dollars can be a challenge. Different people have different ways of learning, and there are some people who are going to find all this stuff useful at some level.

But instead of going down the road of 'educational materials' written 'for the rest of us', you may want to use your time doing some self-directed learning about APIs (or Application Programming Interfaces). These are the tools people tend to use to solve problems in Drupal, and they can apply to a wide range of challenges developers are going to face. Even if you do not consider yourself to be a programmer, you may want to understand what they are all about. Knowing what they are and when to apply them is often the difference between a good Drupal site and a great one.

20 APIs in 20 Days is a blog series published by Trellon, aimed at sharing a little bit of information about module interfaces every good developer should know at least a little bit about. We don't intend to publish information in 20 sequential calendar days, but do plan on spending 20 days going over something important you may find useful to know. So don't give us a hard time when we forget to hit 'publish' a couple days in a row - it's going to happen, Trellonauts tend to be very busy people.

My Feet are Tired, but My Soul is at Rest

mhaggerty — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:09:49 +0000

Trellon is closed today, Monday, January 18, 2010, in observance of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

As holidays go in the United States, this is one that is frequently overlooked and few people stop to really appreciate. There has been great debate in many states as to whether to observe this day or Columbus Day should be observed as a holiday, given the impact it has on various calendars and the ends to which the men worked. It occurs the day before the birthday of Robert E. Lee, a confederate general who has received great acclaim despite the ideologies he fought for. It occurs in the month of January, overshadowed by New Years and the events that take place over the holidays.

Taking a moment to reflect on Dr. King and his accomplishments today is worthwhile, especially so for anyone who has ever worked on an open source project.

Creating Templates with the Interface Module

mhaggerty — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 07:12:10 +0000

The forms Drupal automatically generates have always suffered from the 'silo' effect, where one form field is stacked on top of the other. This often presents a usability challenge for people operating the system, and generally requires some additional level of theming for developers in a really mature site.

Trellon recently released the interface module for Drupal, which is a stab at making it easier to change the look and feel of forms. Interface is a tool for authoring the interface for forms in Drupal by dragging and dropping form fields into predefined regions. This is one of those things you might need to see to see to understand - we have videos demonstrating the module at work.

These regions, the places on the page where you drop form fields, are put into something called a template. This article seeks to explain what a template file is and how to author your own. Our team has put a lot of effort into making it easy to use this module, and this includes authoring new templates. Interface ships with a number of templates we have already set up, and we understand it will be important for certain users to know how to author their own. Writing a template should be one of the simplest tasks you will ever have to do as a developer, right down there with Hello World and executing a print command.

We Work on the Internet, but Our Hearts Belong to Paris

mhaggerty — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 05:22:51 +0000

It's been about a week since returning from Drupalcon Paris, and the consensus at Trellon is that we wish it never had to end. Many of the members of our team have been going to Drupalcons for a long time, and this was definitely one of the most memorable ones on record.

It was great getting to come out and support the community, and what a community it is these days! Being there, you got the sense of how much enthusiasm is building around Drupal, with so many people with different perspectives about what to do with the platform. While attendance was not as high as some previous events, that owed more to the venue than anything else, and you had the sense it made for a better experience.

Drupalcon Paris - Getting Results in Publishing

mhaggerty — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 05:30:02 +0000

Greetings from Drupalcon Paris!

Today, September 4, 2009, from 2:30 to 3:30, Trellon will be presenting a session with Gary Love of Hearst Digitial News to talk about 29-95.com. This web site is an interesting example of what you can do with Drupal in publishing, and we are going to be providing a case study of how it came together, the technology behind it, and some of the business challenges the Houston Chronicle faced in conceptualizing and deploying the site. You can expect to receive slides and notes from the session on trellon.com afterwards. Michael Haggerty, Trellon's CEO and Chief Internet Strategist, and Marc Ingram, Trellon's Technical Lead, will be speaking along with Gary as part of the session.

CMS Expo Learning and Business Conference is this Week

mhaggerty — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 05:09:49 +0000

The CMS Expo Learning and Business conference is coming up this week in Evanston, Illinois. This event is going to be interesting, in part because I will be presenting (more on that below), but also because the session track really covers a lot of bases.

The event is promoted as "Joomla, Drupal, Alfresco & Plone CMS Training," but that only does it partial justice. Looking at the home page, there is this whole CMS Support Training track going on, and there is a lot to learn from the people that are going to be there. Beyond the big names like Apache, MySQL and PHP, there are going to be some other interesting topics worth hearing about.

Alan and Alan, Welcome to the Team

mhaggerty — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 22:22:47 +0000

I would like to welcome a few new members to Team Trellon as permanent additions to our development unit.

We are fortunate enough to be adding not one, but two people named Alan in a single month. That is probably not a record, but it is nice to only have to learn one name. The similarities don't end there, however, and we are happy to be having two technolgists with a serious commitment to the open source community coming on board.