We had our monthly Hong Kong Drupal User Group meetup last week (thanks to CNNGo.com for the always wonderful venue), and this time it is a little bit different. Jason (jyee at Drupal.org) from Aten Design Group, one of the organizers of the upcoming Denver Drupalcon 2012 and a well known contrib module developer has joined us for the evening, and shared some of his thought on "Using Views Programmatically".

For those of you who missed the presentation, here is a video of the same presentation Jason did back in Drupalcon Colorado 2011:

I recently have started working on a Drupal 7 project creating a comparatively simple brochure website. To my surprises a lot of familiar functions, syntax and platform for simple things have changed dramatically! Certainly many functions and handlers are become easier and simpler to do, however there are a lot of simple procedures gets to be more complicated.

Getting the Taxonomy term in page.tpl.php is one of them.

Drupal 6 - Taxonomy Term using $term object

Back in Drupal 6, Taxonomy terms are embedded in $node object. To print the taxnomy term, all you need to do is get it directly from the $node object:

Before we jump right into Drupal CMS, perhaps we should start why the market is obsessed with designing websites with CMS.

What is CMS? Why CMS?

"CMS" (Content Management System) is THE hip, trendy term on the Internet in 2010s. As elegantly described in Wikipedia, a Web CMS is basically a system that "simplifies the publication of web content to web sites and mobile devices -- in particular, allowing content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files."

Generally speaking, the rise of CMS is due to the huge success of Blog platforms like blogger.com. Ever since the launch of blogger.com in 1999, next thing I know everyone has started publishing on the Internet, and the volume of new content published online exploded in folds ever since.

It has been an endless debate in between the 3 groups of CMS fans over which one is better than the other. Of course we as a web design agency we tend to take sides too since we use these tools day in and day out, however, in a more practical, project-oriented point of view.

By Experience

We have worked with Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla before. For a more completely, user-friendly CMS with just enough features, Wordpress is the choice given that their UI is best and most intuitive among all 3. This is a perfect platform to develop websites with simple requirements, e.g. Blog sites.