Drupal

Banat Sport, a romanian news website was launched this week. And it's built on Drupal. I've helped out a friend to build it and the end result is quite nice.

I'll name a few features here: News, Comments, Videos, Standings, Polls, Search, Twitter integration and Newsletter.

It will be a real pleasure to see him grow. It already started to climb in the search results on Google so maybe soon we will see it on the front-page ;)

I've checked Google Analytics for a www.modavastyl.ro, a website I've migrated to Drupal three weeks ago and they already see an increase in trafic of 290%.

:) Drupal SEO features are working nicely. The number of visits is not large, but it increases steadily and it's way more than what they had before. Now, I agree, optimizations could have been made to the old website as well, but that one was just static pages and they love Drupal and how easy is for them to edit the pages without giving me a call.

I've also started documenting about SEO tactics and optimizations. I wanna see if I can bring it to the frontpage in Google. I've been playing around and it's already on the 3 page if you search "vertical blinds" (in romanian :) ), they were on 8 before.

Maybe I'll post one day about what I've learned regarding this.

I've just relaunched www.modavastyl.ro on Drupal. Fairly simple website, the owners wanted to have the ability to add news, pages and products easily. Also SEO features that are great in Drupal.

If you want to display a list of content types or something else in a view and want to number the items, like 1, 2, 3, 4... you get the idea, than the Views Custom Field module is what you need. It does exactly this plus more. Install it and go straight in the views to find the goodness.

Cheers to the developers!

Drupal 6

Available (views)fields:

Markup

Field that allows usage of custom text and the input filter system.

PHP code

Field that allows usage of custom PHP code (with access to view's database result)

Rownumber

Field containing rownumber (respects pagers).

If you are usign the user relationship module in Drupal and want to print an "Add as a friend" link somewhere in the theme, views, etc and you want to preserve the AJAX goodness this is how you do it.

[syntaxhighlighter] <?php print l(t('Add as a friend'),'relationship/'.$friend->uid.'/request/1',array('html'=> true, 'query'=> drupal_get_destination(), 'attributes'=> array('class'=>'user_relationships_popup_link'))); ?>[/syntaxhighlighter]

The AJAX magic is done by the class "user_relationships_popup_link'.

You should make some checks to see if the user is already a friend or if the user is logged in to see the "add friend" link. And check to see if you're not looking at your own profile, so you don't add the link for you to become your own friend.

To check if you already have a relantionship with an user use this:

if ($relationships = user_relationships_load(array('between' => array($user->uid, $friend->uid),'approved' => 0))) {
        print '<div class="user-flags">'.t('You have a pending friend request with this user').'</div>';
}

if ($relationships = user_relationships_load(array('between' => array($user->uid, $friend->uid),'approved' => 1))) {
            print '<div class="user-flags">'.t('This is a friend').'</div>';
}

$friend->uid is the UID of the user you are trying to add as a friend.

If you want to enable user registration with picture, allowing the users to upload pictures during registration, use Register with picture module.

Simple and easy :) Just the way we like it

In Drupal, when you get a 404 page all your blocks are hidden which rather sucks as it blows your theme. This function added to your theme's template.php file saves the day.


/**
* Override or insert variables into the page templates.
*
* @param $vars
* An array of variables to pass to the theme template.
* @param $hook
* The name of the template being rendered ("page" in this case.)
*/
function phptemplate_preprocess_page(&$vars, $hook) {
$vars['path'] = base_path() . path_to_theme() .'/';