August 2009

Related nodes and custom breadcrumbs

21 August 2009 - 17:38

Sometimes, having an easy to use CMS like Drupal or Joomla is just one more excuse to keep on tweaking. Just now I added a related nodes block to the article and project pages. Let's say I write an article like this and I tag it drupal. A couple other articles on the same topic are shown in a block in the right column. Hard to do? I don't think so! Just use the views module an some view arguments, like so.

There's more stuff I changed in the last week or so. I completely changed the functionality of the breadcrumbs. I wanted them to reflect the structure I use for clean urls. But I wanted to use page titles instead of the url shorthand (and lowercase) terms. So I created a little snippet. Let's say I have an project with a fairly simple url like /projects/world-domination.

  1. first I fetch the url and system path
  2. then I breaks it up in into parts using the / as divider (so I have 3 parts: /, /projects and /projects/world-domination)
  3. for each part I check if the url is pointing to a valid page.
  4. for each valid target page I fetch the page title
  5. then I return all the breadcrumbs with valid links back to the theme
  6. If the clean url path wasn't found, the normal system breadcrumbs are used as a fallback mechanism

and... Presto! A simple breadcrumb bar for all the project nodes. Including "Home" and the current page's title. Off course I needed to find other solutions for Views, Taxonomy, System paths, etc. but that's a longer (and even more boring) story. I anyone's curious how I did it. I'll send them the code.

Further tweaks

15 August 2009 - 02:49

Codeculture.nl just got a bit better. The site was (and still is) in dire need of some tweaks to the interface. There were a couple of problems that needed addressing:

  1. I wasn't happy at all with the placement of the search box, it just took too much space and broke the flow of the first lines on the front page. Also I wanted to include the search box on every page and remove the search option from the main menu.
  2. The breadcrumbs looked dull and were hard to read on the striped background under the header.
  3. I started colour coding the pages with a simple rotator, so you get a fresh look if you refresh the page. However I didn't fully implement this. In the near future I'll probably dump the rotator and use the colour codes to brand specific pages.
  4. I found the main menu font colour to be a little too light. Click stats affirm this.
  5. There were some very serious cross browser issues (well, IE issues really, but let's be kind on microsoft for a change). There still are some problems especially with IE7, but at least the site functions properly on all major browsers.
  6. The project thumbnails on both the project gallery and the project nodes were inconsistent and badly delineated.