PDFs have historically been difficult to integrate into Drupal. Site owners were forced to include PDFs as attachments to content, and accept the interruption to the site layout that the external plugin presented. Building on the excellent Scribd API, our new module allows PDFs to be displayed on your site without the Adobe Reader plugin. Scribd Field integrates with the well-supported Filefield module, and allows you to integrate your PDFs into the look and feel of the rest of your site. Read More >>>

The forms Drupal automatically generates have always suffered from the 'silo' effect, where one form field is stacked on top of the other. This often presents a usability challenge for people operating the system, and generally requires some additional level of theming for developers in a really mature site.

Trellon recently released the interface module for Drupal, which is a stab at making it easier to change the look and feel of forms. Interface is a tool for authoring the interface for forms in Drupal by dragging and dropping form fields into predefined regions. This is one of those things you might need to see to see to understand - we have videos demonstrating the module at work.

These regions, the places on the page where you drop form fields, are put into something called a template. This article seeks to explain what a template file is and how to author your own. Our team has put a lot of effort into making it easy to use this module, and this includes authoring new templates. Interface ships with a number of templates we have already set up, and we understand it will be important for certain users to know how to author their own. Writing a template should be one of the simplest tasks you will ever have to do as a developer, right down there with Hello World and executing a print command. Read More >>>

At the core of all the hype around "social networking," and "social media," is the fact that "social" websites allow members of a website to connect with each and develop relationships without needing the administrators or content editors to mediate these connections. This from the "build and they'll come," school of design and strategy. In any case, even though Drupal is a fundamentally social platform, there is no user-to-user relationship support in the core of Drupal. Read More >>>

This is my first official Trellon blog post! It's been a good first few weeks. I have had a chance to work on some exciting projects. One of which involved using the awesome ApacheSolr Drupal Module which adds support for much better search performance and faceted search. Read More >>>

The CMS Expo Learning and Business conference is coming up this week in Evanston, Illinois. This event is going to be interesting, in part because I will be presenting (more on that below), but also because the session track really covers a lot of bases.

The event is promoted as "Joomla, Drupal, Alfresco & Plone CMS Training," but that only does it partial justice. Looking at the home page, there is this whole CMS Support Training track going on, and there is a lot to learn from the people that are going to be there. Beyond the big names like Apache, MySQL and PHP, there are going to be some other interesting topics worth hearing about. Read More >>>