Create your first Drupal module using a module building helper

Today I found an interesting Drupal module, Module Builder. This module will generates a skeleton for a module with hints on how to fill it, very useful for a newbie and seasoned developers to learn how Drupal hooks work.

Below are the feature of the Module Builder:

• Provide a sample standard hook function declarations and a default module header.
• Saves your times to remember what arguments and what order different hooks use.
• The module will automatically selects any hooks based on your needs.
• Option allows you to turn on and off informative comments.
• Automatically parses available hook names.

This module sound very promising, if you have a busy time so do not have much time to read Drupal documentations than this module are worthy to try.

Module Builder created and maintained by Joachim. Visit the Module Builder project page here.

Metropolis through a psychological phase

As a new theme, Metropolis has been through a psychological phase in which users had exceeded 500 sites. From here can be assessed if the theme gets a good response from the Drupal community.

The number of users of these theme are experiencing a steady increase, in a few weeks longer expected to reach 1000 users or more.

Let's look at the development of this new theme in the next few weeks, if the users can exceeds 1000 sites, it stands to reason that the theme is potential enough.

How do I increase my PageRank from 0 to 8 easily?

I am writing this because I ever promised to share how I raise the PageRank of my blog easily from 0 to 8 for www.danpros.com, or from 0 to 6 for www.javaner.com that was still less than two weeks old.

PageRank 8 is a level difficult to achieve, if you rely solely on the blog article you must be the same level with www.engadget.com, www.techcrunch.com, or www.mashable.com who always provide the latest news and quality information, so many other sites and blogs gives a link on a voluntary basis, and it must take a long time and spend no small amount of money.

As a newbie I did something slightly different to increase the Google PageRank of my website, here are some things I do:

• Writing content that is unique (though rarely updated).
• Make a popular free theme for getting backlinks.

From the two points above the most difficult is to make a popular free theme. Creating a theme is my job so gained a high Google PageRank is just a bonus.

Add jQuery pngFix into Danland 7.x

To fix PNG transparency in Windows Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6, Danland 6.x use jQuery pngFix by Andreas Eberhard, for the 7.x version of the Danland theme, I get rid of this jQuery plugin.

And for those of you who want to add jQuery pngFix into Danland 7.x, you can follow the steps I've made here. I just improving the existing codes in Danland's template.php.

Note: remember to clearing the Drupal cache after you've done with it.

Metropolis 6.x-1.3 and Metropolis 7.x-1.2 released

Today we releasing Metropolis 6.x-1.3 and Metropolis 7.x-1.2. This release intended to fix the JS problems that causing some modules not working properly like IMCE and CKEditor.

With this release we confirmed if Metropolis already very stable since until now we only receive one bug report and the bug already fixed.

Download Metropolis 6.x-1.3 and Metropolis 7.x-1.2.

Energy.gov using Drupal

Drupal is very popular among government, many government websites using Drupal such as WhiteHouse.gov, Commerce.gov, and others. Not just among goverment, but Drupal is also very popular among enterprise, recently even Twitter uses Drupal.

A few days ago, Energy.gov also switched to using Drupal because it provides more scalable and flexible architecture compared to another, and saving taxpayers more than $10 million annually. This completes the Drupal wins in government. Congrats for the Drupal community.

You can read the announcement made by Energy.gov here, and see the new Energy.gov Drupal website here.

Google updating its PageRank again on August 4th

On August 4th 2011, looks like Google updating its PageRank again, I found some of my sites PR increased. This is unconventional, does Google changed their habits that are generally updated its PageRank between three to four months to become more frequent?

Yes maybe now Google will display the PR changes as often as possible, let say once a month. I also experienced many changes in my inner pages, a popular article suddenly increases its PageRank.

Surprisingly there are a few domains that I register barely in a very short time its PageRank increased to PR6, or maybe its just a glitch.

The state of Drupal 2011 survey

Dries yesterday made an announcement about State of Drupal 2011 survey. This survey is crucial, since it will guide thousands of people in the Drupal community over the next two years.

If you care about Drupal is expected that you want to participate, the time needed to complete the survey are also very brief, less than ten minutes.

Share the survey with other Drupal users in your organization or with your Drupal friends on Facebook, Twitter or Google+. You can take the State of Drupal 2011 survey here.

Domain hack is a pleasure

Domain hack is a pleasure, even domain hack could be a lucrative business for the domainer, because sometimes the prices can be much higher, i.e. compared about.me with aboutme.com prices.

Domain hack could mean combining the type of top level domain to pronounce certain words or keywords, e.g. inter.net, who.is. And the most popular domain type to use is the ccTLDs, like .me, .it because it is very short and widely used in a dictionary words so it's easy to find the right words or keywords.

For the domain hack, I prefer to use the ccTLDs already considered as gTLDs by Google so it can be used haphazardly, not limited by a particular country. Domain .la is for Laos, but popular in some countries due .la could be interpreted as Los Angeles or Latin America.

Danland reaching the 8K milestone

Yay! Danland reaching the 8K of users. Every week the users of Danland increasing, maybe its because of Danland is so easy to modify and very stable, like you can see if I release the stable version of Danland 7.x on January 6th, so only one day gap with final version of Drupal 7.

For both Drupal versions (Drupal 6.x and Drupal 7.x) already used by more than 4K of sites, so the total for both version is more than 8K of users.