Drupal - Web Development Articles

jQuery for Uppercase and Mixed Case on a Large Drupal Site

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Thu, 11/29/2012 - 16:04

I ran across an HTML/CSS challenge recently on a fairly large Drupal site (~ 400 pages). The designer specified using all-caps for headings and menu items. Naturally, using all-caps is a design decision that depends on the typeface, font size, kerning, etc. Typically, I don't care for all-cap text; but in this case, it was the right call. The catch (which we learned deep into the development process) was that the client wanted certain branded words and phrases to remain in mixed case.

Grouping fields together in Drupal Views

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Fri, 07/27/2012 - 12:19

During a recent project, I needed to group several fields together within a Drupal view. I was creating a dissolving jQuery slideshow with a control panel. Each slide consisted of a fixed-size background image and a body field containing HTML on top of the image. In addition, there is a "counter" field that displays a control button for each slide. The control buttons for all slides are grouped together outside the area that dissolves. The user can see which slide is currently active and flip between slides using those buttons.

A/B (split) Testing with Google Analytics Experiments in Drupal

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Tue, 07/24/2012 - 14:35

I've been wanting to delve into A/B testing for some time, but I just haven't had the time available. Today, I finally decided to jump in and see how long it takes to set up.

Rearranging HTML list items in a Drupal menu using jQuery

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Tue, 03/27/2012 - 10:24

At some point, you might find the need to rearrange or change the order of HTML unordered list items (<ul> <li>). There are a couple potential reasons: you might want to sort the list alphabetically, or, as in the case of a Drupal site we recently launched, you might need to turn an unordered list menu into columns.

Custom horizontal jQuery accordion menu

The products menu at ClarkDietrich.com is based on a custom-built horizontal accordion UI:

Preventing development and staging sites from showing up in Google search results

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Tue, 03/13/2012 - 17:45

At some point, most developers have found that, despite their best efforts, one of their staging or develoment sites has been found by Google or other search engines. Usually, this is because we must make the work available for preview to the client before the site goes live to the world. Without careful planning, it can be tricky to show a staging site to a client, but not to Google. Do not assume that, because you haven't submitted a URL to search engines, they won't find your site. Take proactive measures to keep your dev and staging sites out of search engines.

Wrangling meta tags in Drupal site to control description in Google search results

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Thu, 03/08/2012 - 11:02

If you've ever been confused by where Google derives the text for search results pages, you're not alone. I was surprised today to find my description in Google had recently changed.

Indianapolis Drupal Development – Search results listing

The text "Offers web application development, content management..." is nowhere on my site.

Google uses a few different sources for the description snippets in search results:

Tackling Hierarchical Menu Issues with Drupal and jQuery

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Tue, 11/29/2011 - 15:23

One of the decisions we make when creating a hierarchical menu for a website is whether to create a "landing page" for each section. In other words, does each parent menu item have its own page?

There are three options. Each parent item can:

Getting In-Page Analytics Working with Drupal Google Analytics Module

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Sun, 11/27/2011 - 12:40

It's amazing how much time we need to spend tweaking all our development tools to keep them all playing together nicely. So when I find a problem that takes me a while to fix, I like to post it here in the hope that it will save someone else some time.

Such was the case today when I switched over to the latest version of Google Analytics. In-Page Analytics, one of my favorite tools in GA, stopped working on all my Drupal sites.

Here's the error message I got:

Problem loading In-Page Analytics

Inserting JavaScript and jQuery into Drupal

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Thu, 03/10/2011 - 22:55

In a previous article, I showed how to track comments and contact form submissions using Google Analytics' goals. The method I described involved adding jQuery. So I thought I'd take a few minutes to show how to write custom jQuery or other JavaScript and include it on a Drupal page.