Drupal tips

Graphic design and web development by a non-profit, for non-profits.

CEDC is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that partners with other non-profits on graphic design and web development projects.

[View samples of our design work]

We also host groups for meeting space or overnight rooms in our building in Washington, DC.

[Get more information about our rooms and meeting space]

These are blog entries related to Drupal. Be sure to also take a look at non-profit sites we've designed with Drupal.

Use a heat map to see how your visitors are using your homepage (ClickHeat)

Posted by cedc on Jan 20, 2010

Looking at your stats can give you a pretty good idea of how your visitors are using your site and which content they are finding, but sometimes it would be helpful to know a little more information. Setting up a heat map can help you determine which parts of the page are most prominent and are the best at attracting clicks.

Congratulations, Drupal: "Best open source PHP CMS" and "Hall of Fame" award

Posted by cedc on Nov 10, 2009

Drupal wins again: "Drupal has won best open source PHP Content Management System for the second year in a row in the Packt Publishing 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Drupal won by popular vote and a critical selection by a panel of judges. This award reflects the strong support of the Drupal community and our focus on quality which leads to critical acclaim and rapid adoption for large, high quality projects. Drupal won best overall open source CMS in 2007 and 2008." (From drupal.org)

Whitehouse.gov relaunches with Drupal

Posted by cedc on Oct 25, 2009

There was some big news on the Drupal front in the last few days as the White House relaunched its website using Drupal as its content management system. It's a great show of support for the open source model as well as for the safety and security of using community developed and community tested code.

The Basics of Drupal v. Joomla, Part 4: Keeping your code updated

Posted by cedc on Oct 13, 2009

The Drupal and Joomla projects are both open source collaborations which release periodic updates to the codebase. You should always keep the code updated to the latest stable version that has been released since they often include security updates in addition to new features or bug fixes. (Keep in mind that you should be tracking and updating both the core code as well as any contributed extensions/modules that you may be using.)

The Basics of Drupal v. Joomla, Part 3: Themes and Templates

Posted by laryn on Sep 21, 2009

In the "old days" of web development, you had separate files for each page on your website which contained a variety of information -- the design of the site, a menu system, as well as the content of the particular page. As the web has evolved, we've begun to try to keep some of these things separate (you may have heard discussions about separating presentation and content). Since most sites are now driven by some kind of a database, the content of each page doesn't have to be kept in a separate file.

The Basics of Drupal v. Joomla, Part 2: Modules v. Extensions

Posted by cedc on Jul 30, 2009

This is the second in our series comparing the basics of Drupal and Joomla. As mentioned, both Drupal and Joomla have active communities that support the projects and produce add-ons which integrate with them for added functionality. In Drupal, these are called "modules" and in Joomla they are called "extensions" (a term which encompasses three sub-types: components, modules and plugins).

The Basics of Drupal v. Joomla, Part 1: Introduction

Posted by laryn on Jul 20, 2009

As we usually tell our non-profit partners, both Drupal and Joomla have their pluses and minuses. We recommend each of them for particular types of websites and for particular functional and content-related requirements. That said, we thought it might be worthwhile to start a new series on our blog describing some of the parallels between them as well as highlighting in more depth some of the differences.

Comparison report: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone (by Idealware)

Posted by laryn on Apr 6, 2009

If you're considering a site revision or complete site redo, you may be interested in this recent report by Idealware, comparing four major CMS systems: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone. (We implement sites in Joomla and Drupal at present, depending on the functional requirements of the site at hand).