Oliver Davies

Up until as recent as last week, whenever I added an image into one of my Blog posts, I was manually adding the caption below each image and styling it accordingly. That was until I installed the Image Caption module.

The Image Caption module uses jQuery to dynamically add captions to images. Here is a walkthrough of the process that I followed to install and configure the module. As always, I used Drush to download and enable the module, then visited the Image Caption Settings page (admin/settings/image_caption). Here, I select which node types should be included in image captioning. In my case, I only wanted this to apply to Blog posts.

At the end of my last post, I'd finished creating the first part of the new photo gallery, but I wanted to change the dates of the published photos to reflect the ones on the client's original website.  

Firstly, I'll refer to the previous list of published galleries that I created before, and create something different that also displays the created and modified dates. Picking the node ID of the required gallery, I used the following SQL query to display a list of photos.

Recently, I converted a client's static HTML website, along with their Coppermine Photo Gallery, into a Drupal-powered website.

Over the next few posts, I'll be replicating the process that I used during the conversion, and how I added some additional features to my Drupal gallery.

Sorry for the lack of Blog posts lately, but my new job that I started a few weeks ago has certainly been keeping me busy! I've got a few more posts that I'm preparing content for, and I'll hopefully be back into my weekly-post routine before too long!

Today, I'd like to just give a quick overview of the Admin:hover module. It basically adds an administrative menu that pops up when you hover over a node or block within your Drupal website - the kind of functionality that was present within previous versions of the Admin module. It also integrates well with the Devel and Clone modules.

For this site, I've been using Minnelli - a fixed-width version of Drupal 6's default Garland theme - along with the Color module to change the site's default colour set to Bluemarine as oppose to the standard Blue Lagoon.

Recently, I decided that I wanted to edit the page.tpl.php and node.tpl.php template files, but as I was using a core theme, I wasn't able to change these files. So, I created a copy of the Minelli theme directory, renamed it, and placed it into my sites/all/themes directory. As with the default Minnelli theme, my copied theme would need to use Garland as a base theme, to do this, I added the following code to its .info file:

As a heavily-reliant Quicksilver user on my MacBook Pro, I was glad when I found the Teleport module for Drupal (due to Elliott Rothman's tweet).

In preparation for my Blog posts being added to Drupal Planet, I needed to create a new Taxonomy term (or, in this case, tag) called 'Drupal Planet', and assign it to new content to imported into their aggregator. After taking a quick look though my previous posts, I decided that 14 of my previous posts were relevant, and thought that it would be useful to also assign these the 'Drupal Planet' tag.

I didn't want to manually open each post and add the new tag, so I decided to make the changes myself directly into the database using SQL, and as a follow-up to a previous post - Quickly Change the Content Type of Multiple Nodes using SQL.

This isn't a Drupal related topic per se, but it is a walk-through of one of the applications that I use whilst doing Drupal development work. I assume, like most Mac OS X users, I use MAMP to run Apache, MySQL and PHP locally whilst developing. I also use virtual hosts in Apache to create local .dev domains which are as close as possible to the actual live domains. For example, if I was developing a site called mysite.com, my local development version would be mysite.dev.

Normally, I would have to edit the hosts file and Apache's httpd.conf file to create a virtual host. The first to set the domain and it's associated IP address, and the other to configure the domain's directory, default index file etc. However, using VirtualHostX, I can quickly create a virtual host without having to edt any files. Enter the virtual domain name, the local path and the port, and apply the settings. VirtualHostX automatically restarts Apache, so the domain is ready to work straight away. You can also enter custom directives from within the GUI.

In this Blog post, I will be changing values within my Drupal 6 site's database to quickly change the content type of multiple nodes. I will be using a test development site with the core Blog module installed, and converting Blog posts to a custom content type called 'News article'.

In this tutorial, I'll show you how I created my photo gallery which uses photos imported from my Flickr account.

The modules that I'll use to create the Gallery are: