Things We Do in Drupal

Posted: February 25th, 2009 | Author: msh | Filed under: Our Work | Tags: , , , | No Comments »

Back in the day, Drupal was for us a platform of necessity. There was a lot to dislike about it: no object architecture to speak of, patchy module support, enormous amounts of spaghetti sprawling through the hooks-based function names, a lot of messy UI, and a deep knowledge of magic words needed to theme an element or alter a behavior.  And on the design side, there was this seemingly deep-set predilection towards boxy pages.

Then we really started using it.  Then Drupal 6 dropped.  Now, D6 is our development platform of choice, and our default platform for many kinds of projects.  Here are a few types that range beyond the typical “site with managed content” category.

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Flash and HTML layers: still a problem

Posted: January 7th, 2009 | Author: msh | Filed under: The Craft | Tags: , , , , | 2 Comments »

Update, April 2009: Change.gov seems to have changed their video player size, so the working example in this entry no longer has a strict correlation between the video player and the image replacement.  The principle still holds, though, and it would be an easy fix to create a new replacement image using the naming conventions below. — msh

Happy 2009!  OK, back to work.

Note to developers and designers: you still can’t layer HTML over Flash, and you still need to design around it.  Sad, but true.  For instance, this page on change.gov has the classic problem: a Flash video player at the top of the page, and a menu that draws a layer on rollover.  The two are not friends.

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