It was about a year ago that I wrote my first post on the best Drupal 7 themes. At the time, it was slim pickings coming up with a list of strong choices. Fortunately, a lot has changed since then. 

A couple quick points before we get to the themes. The criteria I used in putting this list together has changed a bit since last time. First of all, these are all free themes. Extra points were awarded if the theme uses responsive design or an installation profile, especially if it includes a WYSIWYG. These are things that I think show extra attention to user experience.

The language negotiation is extendable, you just need to implement hook_language_negotiation_info(). In there, you can do whatever you want, like always default to swedish for now. It also looks like you can limit to what languages you can switch to, I am not sure how that exactly works, though.

Not sure what to do once you add more languages, but you could for example call other negotiation callbacks in yours and fallback to swedish if it not one of the languages you want displayed.

As we enter the 2011 Holiday season, who doesn’t love a freshly updated Drupal 7 contributed modules list?

These modules are great stocking-stuffers for every Drupaller on your list!

In all seriousness, as I mentioned in my last top modules list, the sheer number of Drupal modules (in the thousands) can be very intimidating. For the new developer how do they decide which modules to use? Google search can help you find a module for a specific use case, but it doesn’t help you find the most common modules that seasoned developers use on every site.

So what I have done is trimmed my list down to the top 50-ish modules that I am most likely to use on any given project. Most of these modules I have used on real projects, many of them have been carried over from Drupal 6. Several of these are new Drupal 7 modules that didn’t exist in Drupal 6 and some others are Drupal 7 replacements for Drupal 6 modules.


I hope that this helps both newbie developers as well as newcomers to latest version of Drupal. Enjoy!

Websites are no longer viewed only on a desktop screens. More and more smartphones, tablets and netbooks are introduced to offer new and more convenient ways to access web content everywhere. In this article, Symphony Themes introduces two FREE Drupal 7 themes, Alphorn and Conch, which support display in various devices from smartphones, tablets to laptops and big screen computers.

In the Drupal Conference London 2011 last month, Tom Deryckere showed some figures of the mobile penetration on his session "Bridging gap between desktop and mobile publishing with Drupal": 

Facebook: 200M mobile users, 2x more active than Desktop users
Twitter mobile: 50% of total active users, 40% of all tweets.
Only 21% of Google's largest advertisers have a website that is optimized for mobile.
In fact, Morgan Stanley predicts at the current rate of change and adoption, mobile Web usage will surpass desktop Internet usage by 2015. Therefore, websites in next generation must, either adaptively or responsively, support mobile devices.

In order to show how a mobile website looks, Symphony Themes introduces two Drupal 7 themes, Alphorn and Conch, available for FREE download.

Once the module is installed, any multi-value fields will have an additional "How many values to display" option. Even Taxonomy Term fields that Drupal provides on the default Article content type can be controlled; if users are allowed to create their own taxonomy terms using free tagging, this prevents heavily-tagged articles from cluttering up the front page with dozens of tag links.

Because the display limits are implemented in a field formatter, you can set up different limits for each display mode an entity supports. For example, you might display five photos on a teaser, ten in an RSS feed, and unlimited photos in the full version of a node.

In addition to the half-baked, single-purpose product features mentioned above, Drupal core still carries around very old cruft from earlier days, which no one cares for. All of these features are not core functionality of a flexible, modular, and extensible system Drupal pretends to be. They are poor and inflexible product features being based on APIs and concepts that Drupal core allowed for, five and more years ago.

Drupal core blocks its very own modernization and innovation, and started to heavily lack behind competitors and the overall industry in the past years. It is a stupidly old, poor, and monolothic beast.

Drupal core is not maintainable anymore. There's too much cruft. Too many half-baked features that no one actually maintains.

You’re probably here because you’ve the delightful task of creating a multilingual Drupal 7 installation.
Things have been going OK, you downloaded and installed i18n, switched some translation modules on and happily started inputting content and adding translations.  You figured it was time to created some front pages, of course a separate one for each language, otherwise what’s the point. You figure it’s as easy as creating and translating other nodes, so you do that, set the default front page, take a look, switch the language and…. it doesn’t work!

So rocktreesky is finally running on Drupal 7. I upgraded the site a few weeks ago and thought I'd share my experience. This is a very simple blog site so my upgrade process was fairly simple and easier than it would be for almost any other site out there, although the overall approach is going to be the same with most sites. I got the site upgraded in a weekend, but even as stripped down as this site is, I had to drop features to complete the upgrade. On the flip side, Drupal 7 provided a bunch of little niceties that meant I could remove some custom code from my theme (and overall I really like theming with Drupal 7). Overall, the upgrade was pretty painless for me, but I wouldn't recommend firing up an upgrade for most sites right now, unless you have the time and resources to put some muscle into it. I'll walk through my process and some decisions I made to see why I come to this conclusion.

Field Validation is a new arrival to the Drupal module directory: its 1st release was just a week ago, and it's designed for Drupal 7's new Field API. What does it do? Field Validation allows you to add simple validation rules to custom Drupal fields, using a simple UI.

The module was inspired by Webform Validation, which adds similar validation to WebForm components. Right now, only basic regular expression validation rules are supported support but the module provides hooks for implementing other validation rules.

While creating mutlilingual Drupal sites is getting easier with each release, and each new major version of the contributed modules involved, it still requires you to understand the basic building blocks and plan ahead to find the right tools fit for your job. My article series is aimed at highlighting the thinking behind different components and detailing the sometimes admittedly obscure steps involved to set them up. Note that each article was (to my best attempt) accurate at the time of writing, and the articles are not updated as the tools change. I hope they will be useful for some time.

I've spent a lot of time working on making sure my smaller Drupal sites (mostly run on shared hosts or very small VPSes) run lean and mean. This helps the pages load faster, users are happier, and my hosting providers don't have to shut down any of my sites, even when they're under pretty heavy load.

Here are my three recommendations for making your Drupal 7 website run great on a shared (or low-end VPS) host: