Matt Farina - Tech / Faith / Life

Rotating banner images is a simple way to spice up most sites. It adds something shiny that can hook people in. If you use jQuery, like I often do, then a simple way to do the rotating banner images is using the jQuery cycle plugin. This plugin can even be used along with drupals views module to create dynamic lists of rotating images.

But, there are some downfalls with this approach. For example, if you create a list of images for the jQuery cycle plugin to rotate through you need to set all but one of them not to display with css. Even though most of the images are not initially displaying they are still downloaded in many browsers. If you have a bunch of images loading that have any size this has a potential to waste a lot of bandwidth if those images aren't viewed.

This was a problem that I ran into working on a few sites. Here's a solution I use that solves this problem while working well with Views, jQuery, and any content Views can create.

You can read the complete article at http://www.innovatingtomorrow.net/2008/05/12/rotating-banner-images-with...

Looking for an easier way to follow the content on drupal.org, drupal groups, the drupal planet, and all those forums? The drupal widget is here to help you with that.

The drupal widget works on Netvibes, igoogle, Windows Live, Opera, Apple Dashboard, and Windows Vista. Click one of these buttons to immediately add it.

A special thanks to Netvibes and Greg Cohn for producing this widget. This isn't the first time Netvibes has brought the drupal community something cool and useful. Last year Netvibes launched the Drupal Universe.

If you have any suggestions for feeds to change in the widget please let me know.

Every drupal site or app I've built has used nodes for the content/data objects. I've now come upon a few projects where the data already exists in it's own table structure and needs to remain that way. My first thought was to look at a development framework like symfony or cakephp. I have to use PHP and these are two good php frameworks. But, I'm starting to consider drupal 6 as the web framework for these projects.

In the last few days more drupal wallpaper has come to light.

• Marc Robinsone has created a number of drupal wallpapers. There are even some with a Christmas theme if you want to get festive.
• Nicholas Thompson and a friend of his have started a Photoshop tennis contest going to create some drupal wallpapers.
• Upon request, I created a second version of the drupal wallpaper I created with the drupal lettering in white. You can download it here.

Kudos to everyone who has been creating these great drupal wallpapers that let us decorate our desktops.

Drupal 6 includes some handy features to help start the transition into using PHP 5 in our creations. But, as PHP 4 nears the end of it's life in a couple weeks there are many hosts who haven't switched to PHP 5 or are only updating to PHP 5.0, like Media Temples dedicated virtual server packages are planning.

It's time to push the hosts to upgrade. So, if your host isn't offering PHP 5.2 or not planning on it in the short term consider sending them an email or give them a phone call asking for it.

And, if your host decides to offer PHP 5.2 as fastcgi for an alternative you amy want to consider the performance considerations of such a move.

I've started looking around for drupal wallpapers and there seems to be an utter lack of them. The only one I can find out there now is one on mikeyp.net. So, I decided to put a few minutes into creating a simple one for my desktop. You can get this wallpaper here.

Over the past few months I've been working on a new blog project that will be the center of my technology blogging. You can find it over at InnovatingTomorrow.net. The motivation for this blog stemmed from the same reason Bob and I put Geeks and God together, some conversations on the podcast, and from staring at one to many bad church site that culminated in a challenge.

Last week, I created what I hope to be the final release of the Comment Info module. This version of the module strips out the opt in feature for the module and has it functionally operating the same as the built in feature for drupal 6. The migration path to drupal 6 is nothing. All of the anonymous user data should gracefully just show up in drupal 6 without needing to do anything.

This module will still be supported for bug fixes but that's it.

Last week, the #drupal-churches channel was setup in IRC for chat about church website development with drupal. This channel is tied to the Churches group over at groups.drupal.org.

If you're new to IRC grab yourself a Mac or PC IRC client and sign on to irc.freenode.net.

For more information on Drupal IRC channels check out the handbook here.

Those of us who have used the captcha module for drupal have experienced the pain of working with it. Over the past year there have been many times where the released version just didn't work. Or, you had to deal with the captcha always failing on cached pages. Sure, you could get around this with a little fancy hacking; but, for many drupalers that was more complicated than they could handle. With the new release, thanks to Rob Loach, it all just works.