Tutorials

Mapping address data in Drupal can be confusing, if only because of the great number of contributed modules available that involve online maps. Picking the right module (or combination of modules) is challenging - especially for site builders who are new to mapping in Drupal. In this tutorial, we'll utilize the popular and well-supported Geofield module as one of the key ingredients in the common task of entering address data and having it displayed on an interactive map.

This tutorial contains step-by-step instructions for accomplishing this task, as well as a screencast demonstrating all of the steps.

At Florida DrupalCamp 2013, I presented a session (video included) that demonstrated how to utilize the Feeds, Feeds Tamper, Address field, Geofield, and other modules to create a fully-functional website for searching for Farmers Markets anywhere in the United States. While the session's intent was to inspire people as to what Drupal can do in a very short amount of time, this blog post will focus on the details of the process.

I recently ran into an issue on one of our projects with a Git repository that stumped me for a few days. It was a small project: only three developers committing to a single repository hosted on Pantheon. I kept on running into an issue where I (or any of the other developers) could ever get my local repository to a “clean” state.

Doug Hercules (dhercjr on drupal.org) is a graduate of the 2012 class of the DrupalEasy Career Starter Program and currently working as an intern with DrupalEasy.

This week I was tasked with learning how to automatically close comments on a node two weeks after the node is created. We initially looked into a couple modules that did this well, Comment closer and Comment commander, but since neither is quite ready for Drupal 7, we decided this would be a good opportunity for me to learn more about the Rules module. Maintained by Wolfgang Ziegler (fago) and Klaus Purer (klausi), this module allows you to define actions that are triggered automatically on various Drupal events as they occur. This blog post will walk you through how I accomplished this task.

Doug Hercules (dhercjr on drupal.org) is a graduate of the 2012 class of the DrupalEasy Career Starter Program (http://drupaleasy.com/dcsp) and currently working as an intern with DrupalEasy.

This week I had the opportunity to clone a website from a git repository using Quickstart. Quickstart is a really quick, pre-made PHP Drupal development environment in a VirtualBox, which allows you to install a virtual machine to run Linux on your Windows PC. I've only gone through the process of cloning a site into Quickstart once before, and this time I thought I’d document it in my blog for myself and anyone else who might want to do this in the future. The general idea is this - there’s a site that I need to work on that is stored in a remote git repository. I want to get a copy of the site up-and-running inside Quickstart. To get started, I downloaded Quickstart, installed VirtualBox, then imported the Quickstart file into it.

Using Git to move the code base of a Drupal site from a local development environment to a hosting provider (or vice-versa) is a necessary skill that most Drupal site builders should have. Configuring and utilizing a remote Git repository can be an especially daunting task for people who don't have a strong background with version control systems.

How many times do you find yourself building the same bit of functionality on Drupal sites for various clients? Whether it be a photo gallery, multi-user blog, or slideshow, as Drupal site builders, we often find ourselves re-inventing the wheel. Personally, I’ve been asked to build slideshows on many client (and volunteer) sites that I’m involved with. Over the years, I’ve developed a recipe for a powerful and flexible slideshow that often exceeds the needs of all but the most particular clients. I recently added the ability for the slideshow to be responsive, and now seems to be a good time to share what I’ve done. At the end of this post, I’ve provided the slideshow as a Features that you can implement on your sites.