SEO Expert Blog

Drupal 6 was released today. One of the most exciting new features to me — I only recently learned about — is that the AHAH (Asychronous HTML and HTTP) framework made it into the Drupal core. This means you can create asychronous HTTP request, commonly referred to as AJAX, without writing a single line of JavaScript code.

The new Forms API comes with an #ahah attribute that lets you specify the trigger event, e.g. a mouse click, the callback URL that will be requested after the event occurred and the ID value of the HTML element where the server response will be displayed. Pretty awesome stuff.

ShoppingAds (formerly AuctionAds) is a Drupal module for adding shoppingads.com CPA and CPC advertising banners to nodes of selected node types.

Module Features

• Enter ad keywords or let them be added automatically by using the terms associated with a node.
• If terms are used as ad keywords you can limit the number of terms to be used as search terms.
• Restrict terms used as ad keywords to a selected vocabulary.
• Select from 12 Ad formats.
• Support for shoppingads ad campaigns.
• Select the weight to position the ads above or below the content.
• Select whether to display ads in full view and or teaser view.
• Select the node types you want ads to be displayed.
• Enter color values for border, background, heading, description and links.
• Select the ad style or attitude.
• Specify whether to open ad links in new windows.

I first heard about the Theme Developer module in Lullabot Podcast No. 52. This new Drupal 6 module is part of the great Devel Package, that helps developing for Drupal in many ways.

Yesterday, I watched the Theme Developer Screencast where Moshe Weitzman guides us on how to use the Theme Developer module and what can be done with it. Moshe Weitzman, Jeff Robbins, and Joon Park did nothing less than creating the Firebug for Drupal theming, wow!

Inspired by Dries Buytaert's regular announcements of new Drupal sites, I did some (re)search on which news sites, universities, organizations, companies, musicians, celebrities, communities, software projects, etc. are using Drupal for their websites. The result is the following list of sites, that impressed me somehow. Of course the list is far from complete, so feel free to post Drupal sites you like in the comments.

Bands, Musicians and Celebrities

• Avril Lavigne
• Jennifer Lopez | The Official Jennifer Lopez Site
• Britney Spears | Blackout Magazine - Britney.Com - Jive Records
• Tori Amos Home | The Official Tori Amos Site
• Grateful Dead | Official Site of the Grateful Dead
• Ozzy Osbourne Home | The Official Ozzy Osbourne Site
• Moby
• Crosby, Stills and Nash

Yesterday I spent about two hours looking for a bug, that prevented videos from being uploaded to a Drupal site using Drupal's built in upload.module. The latest SVN commit could not have been the reason for the error, because only two lines of descriptive text appearing on the front end were added.