Something not often considered when creating a small drupal site is the offline theme. I spent some time today figuring out how to make my own offline theme so that when I take a site offline, it isn't given the typical blue theme that has become a cliche in drupal world. I tried to also give it a bit of a "working hard" look to communicate to people that this is a good thing. Here's hoping brown plaid and tools say "quality work" to other people.

I've found a solution to my own needs for version control of my drupal multi-site environment. I'm sure there is room for improvement as I'm far from a master at any version control system, but this is now working for me. I welcome your advice on ways to change or enhance this environment, but first a few words on my goals and why I chose Bazaar over the other options.

I think back not so fondly of the Flexinode days. My first experiences with Drupal included the now defunct flexinode module and I never really got comfortable with it. That's probably part of why I went to Xoops for awhile. I comfortably ran a community site around Biometrics on Linux for a year or so on Xoops and think it is still an option worth looking at, but when I came back to Drupal after the release of version 5, everyone was raving about CCK and Views.

I didn't shed a tear when I found out Flexinode was done. It pioneered the idea of describing your content rather than putting it all in one big box, but CCK clearly trumped over it in implementation. Drupal 5 had become much more interesting. At this point, I had yet to really learn Views and part of that was because views was still ugly and unruly in the interface. It clearly had power to demonstrate the potential of CCK, but only if you could wield it. I messed with Views some, and put it to a bit of use, but the true power evaded me because the interface didn't communicate how the module worked. Module developers were beginning to move toward CCK and solutions to many problems that had previously required custom content types began to be solved by new modules that extended both CCK and Views and recipes to put all the pieces together. This helped to solidify Views and CCK as part of the vast majority of Drupal sites.

This is a super simple way to make adding content to a drupal site just a little bit more comfortable. If you've created a Content Type, then you know you have the opportunity to change the "Title" and "Description" field names. The first time I ran into this I had trouble figuring out why I'd change these. The more I get into Drupal I find more and more reasons to tweak this.

I've been playing around with the idea of a mobile site for awhile now. This evening I've created the very basic beginning of JosiahRitchie.mobi. I used the Domain Access module for Drupal to create a second domain for JosiahRitchie.com that has the same content. Using the Domain Theme module that comes with Domain Access, I can then provide a handheld theme. My current one is pretty much the Zen STARTERKIT theme with a few things stripped out of the page.tpl.php. I'll look to improve it in the future.

I've found myself wanting to change the wording of "Submitted By" in a drupal blog and pages for a church site. When you only have one or two authors and the primary point of the site isn't blogging or writing, then "submitted" seems like a somewhat awkward term. Changing this is really quite simple. Here's a quick tutorial.

1. The first thing you'll want to do is turn on the Theme Developer module. It is one of the ones in the Dev Module.
2. Then click the little button in the lower-left to activate it.
3. Select "Submitted by" and check out the dark grey box that appears. You'll notice that it identifies a function that is providing this. It also identifies a number of other function names it looks for to provide this.
4. You should click on that to take you to a Drupal site that will show you the function.
5. Copy this function into your own theme's template.php file. This is a hook so rename the first part of the function to the name of your theme. The function name will look something like themename_node_submitted(). It should be one of the candidates in the grey box you originally found the first function name in.
6. Inside the code you pasted into template.php, you'll notice the words "Submitted by". Simply change that to your preferred wording. Mine was "Written by".
7. Then you just need get drupal to recognize this new function by emptying your cache by going to the Admin-> Site Configuration -> Performance page.