Drupal Development

By Dylan Shields on 12/01/2015
Chances are, any two visitors to your website will have different preferences when it comes to consuming the content you're offering. People browse websites for various purposes, with a wide variety of preferences and biaises. Providing visitors with options on how content is displayed is appreciated when presented via an intuitive user interface.
In the past, clients have asked me to display lists of content in multiple formats (which is fairly straightforward with a basic understanding of the Views module) and to allow the user to decide what format is most approriate. In this example, I'll...
By Mike Gifford on 01/12/2014
Ryan Weal & Others in the Code Sprint
San Francisco is beautiful in the fall, BADCamp has become a real institution in the Drupal community, and I had an opportunity to present about Drupal 8's accessibility. So I packed my bags and flew down to sunny California and was able to participate in several Drupal Core Code Sprints, the NGO Summit and several talks.
It is useful to go to these community events and to have a chance to hang out with other people who are shaping this community. The Drupal community involves a lot of passionate people who believe strongly in collaboration. It is always exciting to see how people are using...
By Mike Gifford on 10/09/2014
Roadtrip Back from DC DrupalCon
This is a story of our origins that I hope will resonate with others seeking change in this world. There are many truths, some of them are here.
Foundation
The name OpenConcept came from a kitchen table conversation between three friends: Nancy Shaver, Russell McOrmond and myself. The initial idea was to use the Web as an interface for Popular Education (PopEd) and to help build Sustainable Communities. This idea never got off the ground at the time, but Russell continued to direct me in the essentials of HTML, PHP, MySQL and server administration. Russell also schooled me in the ethics of...
By Mike Gifford on 04/09/2014
The Awesome Room from TCDrupal's Sprint Room
At DrupalCon Austin I was asked by Barry Madore of Triplo to talk about Drupal & Accessibility at TCDrupal 2014. In 2013, a team of people had done some great usability and accessibility work on Drupal 8 at the University of Minnesota. This seemed like an excellent opportunity to follow-up on that.
This year Twin Cities Drupal Camp took place from August 7-10. I spent a bunch of my time there in the Awesome Room, which was where the sprints were taking place on Saturday.
I couldn't get there in the week unfortunately, but was able to present my first session about ATAG & Drupal 8 on...
By Mike Gifford on 28/05/2014
Drupal Guy & Octocat sitting in Frank Lloyd Wright Porch
Yesterday we saw profile images get into Drupal.org. This has gotten a bunch of positive feedback as it both modernizes the look of the community and addresses a style bug that goes back to 2010 when the last design (Bluecheese) was applied to the site.  More importantly though it puts a face on the contributors of the d.o community -- we are no longer just anonymous blue nicknames!
The styling changes on Drupal.org are a nice improvement, mostly because it is a regular reminder about the individuals who are pushing to make Drupal better.  Hopefully when we see the images of people's faces...
By Matt Parker on 21/05/2014
The Internationalization suite of modules do a pretty good job of making everything translatable in Drupal 7. But, if you're writing a module that stores its data outside variables or entities, you might notice a few gaps.
On a recent project, I noticed that field display settings (field formatter settings for those familiar with the Field API) are not translatable by default. In many cases, this is fine because the field settings in core modules don't make sense to translate: for example, the number of characters to trim a summary at or the image style to use.
Never use t($...
By Mike Gifford on 29/04/2014
Yes, all of the attention is on Drupal 8. D8, will be amazing! It totally makes sense that when folks talk about Core development that they think about the latest version. Sometimes though it seems that we forget that there are two stable releases with hundreds of thousands of sites using them for every development version of Core.  If this proposal gets accepted, which I think it will, there will 3 supported releases of Core for a few months when the Drupal 9 branch is started.
So we know when Drupal 8 is released that there will still be 3-4 years where we are going to be working with...
By Cindy Warren on 15/01/2014
Drupal Cake
Drupal is 13 today! The community continues to grow and we are proud to be a part of it!
A good excuse to enjoy some cake with lunch.


By Mike Gifford on 13/01/2014
Once again we're happy to sponsor Drupal Camp Ottawa. We'll have more posts on this soon.  There are a number of sessions we're looking forward to presenting and as always look forward to meeting with others in the Drupal community to work together to strengthen the code that glues us together.
By Jesse Payne on 03/12/2013
Working recently with an accessibility focus group has provided some very useful insight into areas where we can make some quick accessibility improvements to Drupal 7. Amongst several other similar improvements in terms of Aria related attributes, we have come to the conclusion that adding aria-describedby to form field elements will help with providing context between form elements and their descriptions. Without context, form field descriptions are confusing.

 

The following is a short example of how we can easily add aria-describedby attributes to Drupal 7 core and webform...

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