Tag: drupal 7

TPL Files and customizing your pages

I need to add a hyperlink to an area of my site. The element comprises a gradient based area with an image over the right hand side. I need this whole area to be a link. But you can’t add a hyperlink with CSS and I don’t want to do it via a module based solution. I want to edit the Drupal files themselves (properly subthemed, or at least submoduled) so that I can understand the product better and be able to make whatever changes that I want to in the future. So, I am going to get the old Quality environment going and test it out there. when I have a procedure in place, I’ll write it up.

Views and Filter Criteria

The views module is one of the greatest strengths in Drupal. But it can be a little intimidating at first. And there isn’t enough documentation available online. but i need to learn it and use it. here is what i needed to do and how i did it.

I have 25 aggregator feeds. I categorize them periodically as they come in from newspapers all around the state. I needed a way to show only the “new” items. So I created a view.

To show only the ones from the current day I needed to create a filter. here is what it looks like

FILTER CRITERIA

the only real problem that i had was how to set the operator. the – 24 hours means go back from the current system time 24 hours as a start point for the view. the operator tells the system to show timestamps of that or greater, which translates to closer to the current time.
Views is a great tool. You have to learn it to use Drupal effectively. Now i am going to learn how to integrate it with panels so I can have the maximum amount of flexibility in displaying my views.

Drupal 7 Presentation – Firebug

Do yourself a favor if you plan on subtheming and install Firefox and Firebug. Google it and read about it and you’ll see why this is such a critical tool for subthemers…

Do yourself another favor and also try Chrome’s Developer tools. you can right click on an element and see all the fun stuff behind it. including the css inheritance. i like chrome more than ff. it’s just faster. even though it is a little big brother-ish. which it is…. but i still like it.

and, i wish that ie would just go away. what a piece of monkey junk….