Insights that inspire

We design a lot of websites at Chapter Three and we've developed a systemized approach using a Fireworks template to speed up and streamline the production process. This template can be used as a starting point or a finishing point, depending on the size of the project. This template does not replace our workflow, but rather enhances and supports it by ensuring that we don't miss any key elements.

Designing the "old way"

We used to design sites by creating a wireframe, and then designing a final composition of the front page, and several key sub pages.

The Problem

While the site itself looked great, the tabs did not. They stood out like a big sore thumb.

The Solution

Style all of the elements.

Chapter Three is in love with Panels. A lot of people are, and with good reason. It has the power to eliminate the need for theme developers, especially with the development of Panels Everywhere.

I have recently returned to Drupal after a long hiatus and while a lot remains familiar, Panels is one of those modules that has grown into a wild, hairy beast. I can't really tell you what variants or contexts are used for, and I'm not quite sure why I have to save twice when updating anything on a panel page. There is scarce documentation about using plugins, and I wouldn't necessarily describe creating a plugin as "fun". But it's a learning process, eh?

So I'll share with you some of the best practices or problems I've encountered, and then maybe Merlin of Chaos will magically appear and comment that there is a far simpler way of doing it. Or maybe some of you have different approaches that you'd like to share or can find faults with my approach?

In this blog post I'll discuss how to make your theme aware of panels, as well as how to create a custom panel layout plugin. Read the full post here.

Chapter Three gets to work on a variety of design projects, ranging from the creation of original designs to working within an existing brand. We recently collaborated with Nvidia to do the latter, producing a top notch site for them under tight deadline in order for them to showcase their new product Tegra at CES.

Total Control, for those of you who are not familiar, is my administrative dashboard module. When enabled, it immediately gives you a panel page with panes showing some statistics on your site. These statistics include counts for the number of users, posts of each type of content, comments, vocabularies and taxonomy terms.

While attending DrupalCampNYC7 this past weekend at NYU Poly, one of the most eye-popping demos I saw was by Roger López, showing off some functionality hiding in the Chaos Tools Suite to empower you to create awesome AJAX functionality, including modal dialogs/forms, without writing a single line of javascript.

As a long-time Drupalist, I have to confess a wandering heart. Over the past couple years, I've grown more and more interested in other software and bigger-picture issues, branching out from the trials and triumphs of developing sites with my favorite CMS and looking increasingly at issues of integration and platforms. However, recent news has brought Drupal itself right back into the center of my thinking.

Chapter Three just launched a site for DML Central, a site dedicated to "promoting and networking collaborative efforts to understand and assess the participatory ways in which digital media are transforming youth learning practices and lifelong learning opportunities." Funded by the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative, DML Central was the second of two projects we did with the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub team, the fi

It was a great time as always at BADCamp. Chapter Three brought in copious coffee from Ritual Roasters and supplied bagels for morning munchies and I was excited to give my "Drupal in the Cloud" talk, as well as a more in-depth presentation on making Drupal fast and scalable. Matt and Jon rocked worlds with their talks digging into what we're calling "The Panels Paradigm" around here, and Squiggy introduced a room full of folks to the nuts and bolts of theming in Views 2.0.

As we all know, Amazon's EC2 service is really beginning to mature as a web platform. Acquia is using it for their managed hosting, and many other companies have proven that with the right architecture and setup, "the Cloud" is more than just a buzzword.

It is a good Drupal development best practice to embed each of your views in code instead of storing them in the database. This technique will allow your views code to be managed by your version control system which makes pushing up changes to views from development to staging to live a much cleaner process. Additionally, since the views code is being loaded from disk instead of the the more expensive database you will see a modest performance improvement. All in all a pretty good thing.