My Drupal Adventures - Charting my Journeys through Drupal Development, Modules, & Themes

Working with Drupal at Bestcovery

Eric — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 22:58:44 +0000

I just started interning at a new start-up, Bestcovery. The site is built in Drupal and I'm mainly working on creating new modules specific to our site and making sure everything is working in sync with our specialized theme. Bestcovery is focused on identifying the best products in a number of categories, like Best Digital Camera, Best LCD TV, Best PS3 Video Game, and Best Coffee Maker.

Google Analytics, a Free Gem

Eric — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:34:01 +0000

Google Analytics is a tool of almost no limits. From my experiences, it blows all the other free site meters out of the water. Imagine a tool that will tell you about every visitor, every key word searched for your site, every page people enter in, how long they stay after entering that particular page, what page people leave on. How long it takes them to leave from that page. Bounce Rates. Exit rates. Etc.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Modules

Eric — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:40:26 +0000

Search Engine Optimization (aka SEO) is a practice among serious bloggers (as well as businesses) to optimize their rank and image on search engines. Let's face it, day to day, all of us use a search engine to get around online. They are the gate keepers. As a regular search engine user, you may have typed in "Drupal Journal" or something and found this blog. There is very little chance you would have found this blog otherwise unless you clicked it on a random web page or heard about it from word of mouth. True, the latter is very possible but Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask… they are the gate keepers.

A GUI Style Administration Menu

Eric — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:59:37 +0000

I don't know about you guys, but when I first started Drupal, I had to go through all the different menus a thousand times over just to find one simple thing. Of course, after a little getting used to, you sort of know where everything is and have a good understanding of how the interface is supposed to flow. But as a beginner, it was very frustrating.

Luckily, and randomly, I stumbled across a module called Administration Menu which replaces the usual navigation links on the left or right side with drop down menus on the top.

Setting Up Search Friendly Links in Drupal with Pathauto

Eric — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 02:39:03 +0000

Drupal comes fairly bare boned, as everyone probably noticed. So barebones that the URLs are just plain indexes. Now, this would be okay for a web page not concerned with search engines, publicity, or ease of use—say an internal company web page where everyone is forced to use it anyway. However, in my case—and in probably every other public Drupal case—we need clean, easy to use links. Something like http://mydrupaladventures.com/content/my-experiences-migrating-wordpress-drupal instead of http://mydrupaladventures.com/content/2 which really tells nothing.

My Experiences Migrating from Wordpress into Drupal.

Eric — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:17:59 +0000

Like many new Drupal users, I am originally from Blogger then migrated to Wordpress, then my geek-soul lead me across the path of Drupal (actually my internet guru friend recommended it). If you are reading this blog, I assume you are already aware of Drupal, understand its amazing potential, and also see it as a formidable monster to slay.

All kidding aside, Drupal offers almost endless possibilities at the cost of knowing a fair amount of internet programming.