Drupal Planet

I've been looking at various LiveChat modules for Drupal sites and after testing a number out I finally found one I liked, Zopim LiveChat.

It's slick, quick and provides all the basic requirements plus a few neat additional things such as user stats, history, visitor lists, customisable sounds. If you wanted you could have unlimited chats for $11.20 a month or the full version for only $20 a month!

Looking back over my blog it's made me realise how much Drupal has pushed the company forward and how at the same time we've been able to help the community along the way. I thought I'd put this post together as a bit of a retrospective and a starting point for how the blog is going to change in the coming months.

We're riding the crest of the wave that is Drupal's burgeoning popularity amongst the masses, not just the few and in sharing our most popular recent Drupal related posts it will help those recent adopters at the same time.

So here's our most popular recent Drupal posts and do look out for a further post on how the blog will shape up in future, more posts for beginners coming soon.

The Ultimate Resource For Drupal Beginners

After responding to a question on Linked In I'm a Drupal newbie, do you know of a free online course that can help me understand better how to use and manage Drupal? I thought I'd take the answers and then develop them further into this guide.

After responding to a question on Linked In I'm a Drupal newbie, do you know of a free online course that can help me understand better how to use and manage Drupal? I thought I'd take the answers and then develop them further into this guide.

Naturally the first place to begin is Drupal's own documentation which contains loads of useful info. Beyond this you can use the
Drupal forum or Drupal Groups to find solutions or ask your own questions.

Once you've used Drupal for a spell and found Google to be your best buddy when trying to track down code tips and tricks, you might be thinking there must be a better way to learn Drupal. Well you can't beat getting your hands dirty and getting stuck into some coding by trial and error but if you're looking for a more structured method to learn Drupal I'm hoping the list below should go some way to help you.

Summer time is now officially here, the sun is out (for the moment!) so what better time to get some inspiration for your Drupal web designs.

We all like a bit of splash of colour in our designs but it's not always easy to find that balance between colourful and break out the sunglasses time!

So hopefully I've pulled together 10 designs, all on Drupal based sites (read more on Drupal if you don't know your CMS from your HTC), that bring that dose of colour along with good design.

Echoing Green

SmartGrid

Voucher Codes & Discounts are big business since the advent of sites such as Groupon and vouchercodes.co.uk. So with this in mind OffersOn was created supplying daily voucher codes, discount vouchers and meal deal restaurant vouchers.

OffersOn wanted an Open Source solution and having researched the market Drupal was top of the list. A design was already in place so it was our job to build and theme the site around this.

The client is very happy with the result but we thought we'd highlight just some of what went into the site.

Modules

Here's the latest group of new modules I've selected for your viewing pleasure! I'm going to make this into a regular feature so do let me know if there's a module out there that deserves some attention.

Out of the 5 modules below the two that stand out for me are Views Supertable and Textualizer. Take a look at the demo linked below and you'll see what a cool module Views Supertable is. The Textualizer module also looks good and uses JQuery to create some neat text transitions and is supported by most modern browsers and IE!

Although a couple of the modules are still dev versions they are in active development so expect a full release soon.

Day 3 started off with a large bucket of tea to try to keep me awake for the rest of the day after a great night out at the o2 Arena for the Drupalcon party. Batman live was great and a show I'll try and take my nephew to.

The free drinks after were also most welcome but this did have an impact on my attention span on day 3!

The keynote today saw The Standardistas discuss marrying web fundamentals with timeless design standards and gave some great tips.

The guys started of with a short list of reading:

• HTML5 for Web Designers
• Grid Systems
• Ordering Disorder