How many plugins does it take to get a working site?
Well I know that my most recent post was going on about the problems with WordPress plugins, and there being 10 versions of any one plugin rather than the dev community working together to make one good plugin.
Well this post is to gripe about the number of Drupal plugins it takes to get a workable website. honestly on my WordPress site I have 7 plugins, each addressing a specific need. On Drupal, a site with a blog and pages? 18 plugins, and I am not counting core or even core optional modules. Really if you are just wanting a CMS use WordPress or Joomla or something simpler.
Why use Drupal? Couple of killer plugins, and FLEXIBILITY.
WordPress: plugin hell
So I am pretty new to WordPress, but my first impressions chronologically were:
- “wow this is really simple to use” – WYSIWYG editor, image insertion all there (I do a lot of Drupal)
- “Pages can not get categorised!!??!!??” – Bump into limitations
- there are multiple of each plugin, why can’t these people work together?
My last one is pretty important, and affects Joomla too; if all the plugin builders working on Amazon plugins worked together there would be an amazing plugin, except all these people are in it for personal gain and adulation? so it looks like a bunch of kids fighting over a toy and all saying mine, mine mine. (I see this every day, my daughter is 2yrs old 
WordPress – IP to Nation or Country Plugin
I love getting something right and it is really satisfying when someone provides their code GPL’d. I just use the IP to Nation WordPress Plugin to do the following on a client’s site:
- Display a country flag of the visitor’s detected country
- Display a link to country specific information if the user is from one of the focus countries.
- Prepopulate the country dropdown of the contact us form.
And I really do not need to explain how I did this because the documentation here is pretty good.
Sometimes I am not moaning
Web Analytics for Social Media
So if you have a social application vs informational vs retail, you are clearly going to look at your data differently, which is basically what the ClickZ article is saying: Web Analytics for Social Media – ClickZ. But what is perhaps pertinent is understanding your application and your user interaction model, and your data is subjective more than ever before. you can compare one retail store with another, and work on benchmarks, but can you compare one Facebook application with another, and apply benchmarks on one to the other?
Social media analytics interpretation comes down to understanding your application, and so often a social application’s lack of offline parallel is what makes this difficult:
Online retail – Offline retail
Online search – Yellow pages? (Took a while for this to resolve itself into not being a closed directory, but some search still is directory based)
Microblogging – ?
(Social) Bookmarking – ?
Social within social, Facebook applications – ?
Drupal: Define a new block area in your theme
I am using Drupal 6 and wanted to define a new block area at the top of the page for banner ads, how is it done?
1. In the theme folder in the theme definition file my_theme_name.info add the following (usually at sites/all/themes/theme_name/my_theme_name.info):
regions[banner_top] = banner top
2. In the file page.tpl.php (in the same folder most likely sites/all/themes/theme_name/):
<?php print $banner_top; ?>
3. And this is the thing that catches everyone, in the admin area:
Go to admin/settings/performance and at the bottom click on the “Clear cached data” button.
If you now navigate to admin/build/block and you should see your new block highted. You can edit page.tpl.php to get your positioning, and there is no need to flush the cache again.