Development Blog

Welcome to the new DailyIllini.com

Dear Readers,

For the past several years, The Daily Illini has strived to be a leader in online journalism for college newspapers. Having received multiple national and state awards for our Web site, you might wonder why we’re not just sitting on our laurels but decided to transform completely DailyIllini.com into the new Web site you see before you.

   Steve Contorno    4/4/2009 - 11:40 AM    6 comments
Using Views templates to make prettier comment counts

Problem: Views can output comment counts, but only the number with an optional label. This means by default the best you can do is something like 'Comments: 2'. The design specified for 'Post your comment' for 0 and '$num comments' along with a link to the comments section of the node.

Solution: Views templates allow you to have more control over how certain parts of the view are displayed. For an overview, check out this tutorial.

   Jeff Merrick    1/29/2009 - 6:26 PM    Post your comment
jQuery Plugins and Code

Drupal ships with jQuery which is great because it's my favorite javascript library. Fast, easy to learn and has tons of plugins.

   Jeff Merrick    1/29/2009 - 5:27 PM    Post your comment
Breakouts

With some help from Nikki on the explode function, I was able to get breakouts working. Breakout information is collected through CCK fields and then outputted through Views. Each view is then embedded with the views_embed_view() function (more on that here). I didn't use views for the generic breakout because it was pretty simple and wasn't outputting the way I wanted.

   Jeff Merrick    1/29/2009 - 5:12 PM    Post your comment
Design: Comps

Comps were the most complex and time consuming part of the planning and design process. With smaller sites it's generally sufficient to have a comp of the homepage and a couple of secondary pages.

   Jeff Merrick    1/29/2009 - 4:57 PM    Post your comment
Information Architecture: Wireframes

Wireframes were the second step to the information architecture planning process. Wireframes allow you to set up a grid and decide on the location of elements without worrying about the design.

   Jeff Merrick    1/29/2009 - 4:37 PM    Post your comment
Information Architecture: Site Map

Naturally, we didn't jump right in and start coding the site. There were several months of planning, meetings, and mockups. One of the first steps of the information architecture planning process was to determine the structure of the website with a site map.

   Jeff Merrick    1/29/2009 - 3:43 PM    Post your comment
Importing the Wordpress blogs

Daily Illini blogs were successfully imported from the old Wordpress installation we've been using. As there was really no module available to help with this task, the import was done using a PHP script. The Wordpress database was queried for the blog information, the information we needed for the Drupal site was extracted, and then inserted into the new database.

In addition to the blog posts themselves, we also brought over the blog users, comments, and tags. The script does not create views, blocks, or other display-related components. It only imports the data into Drupal.

   Nikki Blight    1/20/2009 - 12:17 PM    Post your comment
Passing arguments from panel to a view

The alpha release of Panels2 seems to have some issues still, which, realistically, is to be expected of an alpha release. Hopefully, we will get lucky and a more stable and less buggy beta release will become available prior to our projected launch date. I'm not exactly thrilled by the prospect of using an alpha release module on a live production site. Fortunately, it seems stable enough for simple layouts, so we'll continue developing on the assumption that it will remain usable.

   Nikki Blight    1/2/2009 - 6:44 PM    Post your comment
Building a flexible scheduling system in Drupal

This will be a step by step tutorial covering how our preliminary attempt at a scheduling system encompassing multiple pages and multiple schedules was built.

Part 1: Creating the fields

Before we can schedule anything, we need some content types that are capable of being scheduled.

1) Define a new content type to hold scheduled data. Eventually, we will have multiple schedulable content types, but we will start with the basic Article type. Create the new content type as usual and save.

   Nikki Blight    12/10/2008 - 7:06 PM    Post your comment
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