Is your creative team completely opposed to designing in code? They shouldn’t be. Here’s a hybrid approach to rolling custom Drupal themes that has the potential to significantly streamline your workflow and ensure greater visual consistency throughout your project’s lifecycle - all thanks to Style Tiles.

We're happy to announce the Michigan Drupal Web Design September Meetup: Securing the Stack: Hardening Your Drupal Deployment.

I dug this video out of the archives from the first DrupalCamp Michigan in 2011.  While many Drupal developers have a lot of success building websites without a coding environment more complex than a text editor many times more serious tools are required.  My presentation below gives users a basic introduction to debugging Drupal and how you can get started within no more than an hour worth of effort.

One of the nice things about Drupal is the low barrier to entry: anyone can download it, install it & have a basic site up and running in a few minutes.  Unfortunately, once the initial setup is complete, people often don’t bother to look at anything else other than what they need to start adding content to their sites.    

It's easy to get Google Analytics set up on your website. For a Drupal site, it's as simple as installing a popular contrib module. Oftentimes, though, your site features on-page interactions that do not register by default to GA, but that you still want to track.

When National Geographic Networks needed a new Drupal site to preview their shows for advertisers, they turned to the Drupal experts at Commercial Progression.

I am always fascinated by the tools that other developers use. It’s usually the first thing I ask them. “Hey, I know I haven’t asked you your name yet, but what operating system do you use? What IDE? How many git commits have you made today?”

I'll be teaching a class at Washtenaw Community College this winter semester entitled Drupal: Build and Manage Powerful Websites. It's a 6 week long class meant for Drupal beginners and will focus on using Drupal instead of developing or installing Drupal.

Come join me at the September Drupal User's Group meeting in Ann Arbor on September 27th, 7PM, at SPARK Central.

I've been asked to webcast an event this Wednesday morning, September 1, by Detroit Public Television. The event will be taking place in Auburn Hills, MI and will have some big players including the U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

Watch it Wednesday, 9/1/10 @ 10 AM ET on DPTV.org

I had the pleasure of visiting the Detroit Joomla! Group last week after being extended an invite by Shane Sevo to start a discussion between our two groups of how Drupal and Joomla compare and contrast.

Watching a really good webinar from the Los Angeles Drupal User Group on how to use Git for version control (Drupal.org is moving from CVS to Git with Drupal 7).

If you're familiar with CVS or Subversion this is a great introduction that provides some comparisons between methodologies and commands. If you're new to version systems then Git is a great place to start.

Below is a video from my presentation at Refresh Detroit last month. The audience consisted of web designers, librarians, Wordpress and Joomla fans, and more. I explained a little about why Drupal is open source, what that means to people and businesses, and how you can both benefit from and contribute to Drupal.

I'll be giving a presentation in a couple days at Washtenaw Community College. I've been invited by Brad Czerniak to speak as part of Refresh Detroit's monthly meeting on using Drupal to solve real-world problems. The presentation is entitled Applied Drupal: Leveraging The Nature of Open Source to Deliver Great Websites for Clients.

Presenters are Brad Czerniak, Alex Fisher and Steve Colson.

There are two types of people who design websites. The first, who I'll refer to as Type 1, is someone who's less experienced or not fully focused on web design and lets technical issues or the constraints of an off-the-shelf template dictate the end web site product. The second, called Type 2, is someone who figures out what the site must do to be relevant and meet business goals and then designs the site so it does exactly that.

Creating a Drupal based website with a blog on a page other than the front page can be frustrating and a bit confusing. By default, when Drupal is installed it has two content types, Story and Page, and lists on the front page any stories or pages you create and mark as Published and "Promoted to front page". However, many sites want their front page to be a static or semi-static Page and a blog in a different section of the site.