I’ve seen a few blog posts and screencasts over the past few weeks about Drupal’s every growing list of modules - most notably Matt Petrowsky’s outstanding screencast “Top Drupal Modules” at www.gotdrupal.com. While useful to those new to Drupal, they all seem to focus on the ones that all Drupal developers know about (or should know about at least).

THUSA has been using the Drupal Content Management System (CMS) to provide professional, high-quality websites and applications to its clients for 18 months now.  

Our clients have taken it on because they have recognised that there are some very salient business reasons for outlaying slightly more money at the beginning of the process of getting an internet presence developed and basing a website on the Drupal Content Management System.

It’s taken a few years now for the battlefields of the browser wars to begin to be levelled. Web designers have been on the front lines, trying to doge the shells of legacy browsers exploding all over their carefully crafted pages. It has become commonplace for a designer to have to be proficient in a arsenal of hacks and tricks so that even the design of a simple page is consistent across all of the available browsers.

This week kicks off a series of blog posts that will cover what we consider to be the top five old school CSS techniques that everybody should know.

There’s a lot of great stuff out there about the new cutting-edge CSS3 techniques which, while brilliant (and I’m SO going to be using them soon), don’t have sufficient browser support to implement them in full scale commercial projects just yet.

We’re therefore going to go old school in this series and cover some of the techniques that we use on a regular basis when developing sites here at THUSA.

As a knowledge management and distribution tool, MediaWiki is pretty cool. It allows the creation of rich libraries of knowledge on any topic, fed directly by contributors and users alike. For developers, it is a godsend as it's simply a matter of implemententing the framework and then opening the doors to the writers to fill in the content with very little specialist knowledge required. It's all very, very good.

You know there's a "but" coming don't you? Yes, you do...

BUT...

So you've spent ages working on that custom theme for your Drupal site. You've got all the myriad of CSS files to work together in harmony (finally) and have even got your head around the phpTemplate engine. You've wiped away the blood from you fingers, the sweat from your brow and the tears from your cheeks. Life is good!

I came across an excellent blog entry today written by Nick Burcher (www.nickburcher.com) in which he lays out the Facebook usage statistics by country - giving the number of users in March 2008 and March 2009 and mapping the change in between.