A blog about web development and Drupal.
With mobile devices being so popular, web users increasingly use mobile browsers instead of desktop browsers to surf the web. Developers and designers need to keep this in mind when building web sites to avoid potential revenue loss due to web pages being unattractive or unusable on mobile devices. Designing for mobile is a real challenge because a site must be tested on an array of devices with different screen sizes which may also be running different software. Not too long ago, Adobe released a tool that can ease this tedious task: Adobe Shadow. Shadow makes it a breeze for developers and…
Although the CCK3 module had never seen a full release, it was still worth upgrading Drupal 6 sites from CCK2 to CCK3, because the latter added a very compelling tool to CCK's arsenal: Multigroups. This feature allowed users to group several fields together, and enter multiple values into that set of fields as a whole by repeating the field group whenever a new value is added. For instance, let's suppose your node has an event multigroup containing date and location data. If you were to add a new value to this multigroup, a new set of date and location fields would appear, and you could enter…
Mobile devices are gaining incredible popularity when it comes to accessing web content. Web site owners and web developers are facing the challenge of having to serve all the needs of mobile users as well as web users. I have recently been given a chance to work on a Drupal site that serves web users and mobile users from one singe Drupal installation. The idea of serving mobile sites with Drupal has long been around. Apart from the fact that mobile is an important focus of Drupal 8 development, a host of good contributed modules exists for previous versions that aim at making Drupal mobile…
Drupal has a setting that allows you to put the site off-line, and show a maintenance message to the visitors. However, in order to determine that the site is in off-line mode and load the maintenance page, Drupal still needs to boot up to some extent, which involves loading several PHP files and connecting to the database. This may lead to the visitors seeing error messages, if the site is being tampered with while they try to access the site. The problem stems from the fact that the massive amount of files that Drupal has cannot be replace instantly, and the site may be in an inconsistent…
At Urban Insight, the Kaltura video platform is one of our favorite video hosting services because it has excellent support for mobile devices. Uploaded videos can be converted to mobile format, and when Kaltura code is embedded in a site, videos play nicely on virtually any mobile device. Unfortunately, the Kaltura Drupal module does not currently provide effortless support for the Kaltura HTML5 player feature. Enabling The Kaltura HTML5 Player with the Drupal Kaltura Module The website for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which I have helped to develop and support, requires support for…