Well, folks, I finally got around to migrating the blog from WordPress to Drupal, along with a new design to boot.

The new design brings along with it structure changes as well. I've placed more of an emphasis on the main categories I usually write about, and also feature related articles if there are any.

I'd love comments or suggestions on both the new blog information architecture, as well as the design.

Thanks!

As some of you may or may not know, I'm completely redesigning my blog. Actually, this is the first time I've had time to design my blog in the first place. Anyhow, one of my major requirements for the new design is excellent code syntax highlighting support.

Pete Karl, a colleague and developer at GateHouse Media, wrote an excellent blog post summarizing a current project we're working on. He outlines some best-practice guidelines for project management, from the early discovery stages to wireframing to first-draft design mockups. It's well worth the read.

Drupal is an excellent content management system. It provides far more than just content management. It provides well thought out and time-tested functionality for user management, security, page caching, and the ability to easily extend your Drupal website with custom code (along with many, many other features). Drupal, however, does not design your website. So, why do most Drupal themes look alike? Great question!

Using 'Primary links' for your Drupal site's main navigation menu is a great idea. However, most themes by default display primary links in such a way that if the menu has sub-child menus, they will not be displayed. Fortunately, the solution is much easier that you'd think.

First off, the way that most themes generate primary links is like so:

As mentioned, this will only output the top-level menu items, like so:

So we have some websites. A lot of websites. About 394 from last count. They're all newspaper sites, they all want blogs, and we want them to be using Drupal for their blog platform. Unfortunately, they're all hosted on a content management system that isn't really meant to be a robust blogging platform. So we had a predicament on our hands. How do we clone 300+ websites into Drupal sites?

There has been a boatload of discussion amongst the Drupal community regarding best practices for managing developement, staging and production environments with a Drupal codebase. The reason this is usually a sore subject for many Drupalers lies in Drupal's heavily database dependent site configuration and management.

One thing that always bothered the crap out of me about OS X was their implementation of 'Terminal'. Staring at a black box with only white text is quite unnerving. I'm not sure how their seemingly graphically-anal designers at Apple could handle it. Anyways, there's fortunately an easy solution to this ginormous problem.

There's an excellent tutorial that runs through the process of customizing just about everything with Terminal, but I'm going to get right to the point with as little extra stuff as possible.

Well, after being one-upped, two-upped and three-upped by Pete and Lauren, I decided to go out and get myself a snazzy new grill so I can get back into the cooking scene. When I say 'back into', I mean 'start'. My psuedo-chef position at Wegmans doesn't count, I don't think.