idonny's blog

Drupal Views Boomarks vs 'Promoted to frontpage'

To add granularity to the items in a given view that should be shown on a given list, you can either use:
  1.  Taxonomy terms - has the disadvantage of being listed in the term listing for that node unless you do extra work to exclude the vocabulary
  2. Re-purpose the 'promote to frontpage', or 'Sticky' settings already provide in Drupal - can have side-effects by affecting the promote and sticky features; since this is a 'misuse' of features
  3. Views Bookmarks - This module provides the features of the above alternatives without the disadvantages of either option.

Adjusting element transparency in IE and Firefox

Standards compliant browsers (FF, Safari etc) and IE browsers require different CSS selector definitions to implement transparency. Here is what is necessary to set the following element to 50% transparency.

div#header
    {
        opacity: 0.5;
        filter: alpha(opacity = 50);
    }

Why I stray from Web Standards ...

Being a staunch supporter of Web Standards, I am often at the forefront of implementing new formats and standards as documented by the W3C. Occasionally, I have no option but to compromise Web Standards. In my current situation, I am attempting to start using the element in place of . IE7 and a number of its predecessors are preventing me because they will not display

Website content above the fold?

Always trying to keep web content above the fold is a former-truth that has proven resilient, and is becoming a liability to web-page design today. It has been proven time and again that if your site has an intuitive and interesting design that will capture and keep the attention of your visitors, your visitors will scroll below the fold. Click-tale has recordings supporting this, and that prove the point that more that up to 75% of website users scroll below the fold, and many of them way down to the bottom of the page.

Reusable CSS: make your life easier

I have come to find that while using CSS for layout, all hierarchical content is represented as UL or OL lists, and others items are enclosed in DIV or SPAN regions or left as orphan elements. CSS layout based on the above mark-up structure will have some repetitive definitions. For instance, all horizontal menus my require CSS to turn an unordered list into display: inline; layout, set the list-style-type: none; This means that you can make your life easier by creating a set of CSS definitions that can be the basis of all your layout and presentation.

Apple Safari is benefiting Internet Explorer?

The introduction of Safari for Windows might appear to be an attempt to eat away Microsoft Internet Explorer's market-share. On second thought though, most of the people that use Internet Explorer do so because it is the already available Web browser who will not care to replace IE with Safari if they have not already moved to Safari.

Drupal 6: Accessing and checking if a comment author is in a given role

I admit that I have spent more time than I should have looking for a solution to this issue - I should have looked in the Drupal documentation api.drupal.org first.
It is relatively easy to check the roles of the current user (global values). There are also a number of approaches that have been discussed on Drupal.org and elsewhere on how to find out (get a logical TRUE/FALSE) is a given user (such as the author of a given document) is in a certain role.

For instance,

Some timely and welcome changes to the idonny.com website

You may have already noticed that the website - idonny.com looks a little,or significantly different. We have made some changes to the look & feel (UI) in addition to the more significant content changes.

Just to list them:

Drupal template tpl definitions based on monitor/user screen size

Here is a question that I just received from a visitor to my website - since the answer is fairly extensive, I have decided to make a blog post out of it to provide a good layout for this and other users to review my proposed solution.

Question:

Splitting an SVN repository? How to move from a single SVN repository to multiple repositories without loosing project history

This idea will enable you to 'split' your single repository into multiple smaller repositories without loosing history. As you can see, the word split here is in quotes because it is not a real split, but rather a walk-around the fact that dumping a repository and importing sub-sets/directories that may have interlinked merges and branches is a risky venture that is rarely worth the sweat and toil.