Content Management
HTML5 in Drupal 7
I have been meaning to write this post for awhile. A few friends have asked me to explain how to do HTML5 in Drupal 7, via Twitter. Another concerned individual, having found a passing reference to it in a book review, even emailed:
“I urge you to start producing this post just as deeply as you explained basic 960 principles. How I enjoyed reading it. It was like a chat with a soulmate! It is a rare opportunity to read background on why things are the way they are. In my mental system, why is the key ingredient to know what are you doing.”
So, without further ado, here it is…
Why Drupal?
Lately I’ve been asked in several different ways what essentially boils down to one question: “Why Drupal?” The subtext of the question is: “Why not some other system such as [insert your favorite CMS here]?” Allow me to explain…
F1 + EE Module
In preparation for our annual Dynamic Church Conferece — For the past month or so, my coworkers and I have been diligently (read: frantically) working on our respective applications that each consume the brand new Fellowship One RESTful API. I was half of a two-man team tasked with creating an EE module, to allow churches to display a list of members within their own site.
We dubbed it Listee (play on the “EE” moniker).
Mosso + Textpattern
For the past few weeks, I have been trying out a new host, Mosso.com. During my search for solid hosting, I have been using my own site as a guinea pig.
Backstory
I had been on the lookout for a new host, since the up-time at Dreamhost had been questionable over the past few months. They also recently had a security breach that left quite a few user accounts vulnerable. Thankfully, mine was unaffected.
Textpattern Solutions
As can be seen clearly in the following photo, my dad not only wholeheartedly endorses Textpattern, but its use on personal computers as well…
Textpattern 508 Links
One thing I love about W3C validator, for both HTML and CSS, is the keen ability to check incoming referrals, and validate against those pages. This makes creating and maintaining valid code a lot easier than if you had to manually type in every URL or hard-code the links into your pages.
This is something I have long felt was lacking from services such as the automated accessibility checker Cynthia Says.
Lazy Textpattern SEO
Have you ever noticed that Google’s search result excerpts sometimes have seemingly random snippets of text, while at other times there is actually an intelligible description of the page? While you cannot really control the random snippets, as those are determined by specific search terms, you can control that descriptive text with a fairly certain degree of accuracy.
While the method of doing so is fairly common knowledge in SEO circles, I am explaining it anyway, in case it is unfamiliar to anyone.
Pseudo TXP If_Not
There are a myriad of plugins out there for Textpattern, and I get quite a few emails asking if I know of ones that add negative conditionals. Being the perfectionist that I am though, I tend to shy away from plugins unless there is simply no other solution to the problem. This is for two reasons: First, I don’t like having to keep track of all of the plugins I am using, and the URL‘s for each one.