Making CommunitySense

Although images are such a staple of today's websites, strangely enough proper image handling is not part of Drupal's core functionality modules. In particular, I was looking for modules that allow image galleries to be created. Although many people recommend the Gallery2 module for Drupal, I also read posts that said it can be very complex to install and finetune it. Many people therefore recommend the Drupal Image Module.  read more »

There is a problem with the standard way Drupal creates "Read More" links for node "teasers" (e.g. the first few lines of a blog post). The following snippet gives an example:

The "read more"-link is placed obscurely next to other links. Furthermore, there is no visual indication showing that this post actually goes on for quite a while. If the teaser stops at the end of a sentence, it may look like there is actually nothing more to read, preventing the reader from looking for more.  read more »

Visualization of data is a powerful idea in community informatics. Creating a Powerpoint slide is nice for a public presentation, but to make web sites come alive, automated, data-driven approaches are indispensable. One of the most powerful and elegant generators is GraphViz. This suite of tools allows human users, or, much more powerful, data-driven applications, to "program" an image as it were. To this purpose, it offers a whole range of primitives and parameters, which can be used to generate very complex graphics.  read more »

I installed my first 3rd party-Drupal module (Tagadelic). However, after extracting the module files and ftp-ing them to the info/modules directory, nothing showed up when trying to enable the module. The trick is in that, since version 5.x, a separate external module directory is needed:

"as of version 5.x you should create a sites/all/modules/ directory and put uploaded modules there."  read more »