Do you have a website running the Drupal CMS? If so, are you wondering about how to have a different header on each individual page? Well you can. Thanks to the great Drupal community, some contributors have left some great information on how to do this quickly and easily. Here’s how it works. In Drupal, your content types have different node Id’s associated with each piece of content. Using a simple PHP and if statement, you can associate specific headers with specific node ID’s. You follow? Here’s how the code breaks down… This link gives you the step by step instructions to get this done on your Drupal website. I used these instructions and they worked perfectly for me on a few of the Drupal Themes that I have built out recently. Comment back if you run into any snags. I’d love to answer any questions you may have.

My wife and I started a web development company back in June of this past year 2007. In doing so we sought out using open source applications to help us run our business from the beginning to help us save money. Using open source software rather than proprietary software would enable us to keep as low of an overhead as possible. In searching for alternatives to open source software (paid software) that could actually benefit our business and what we are doing, it was striking to find out how much money we could have been spending. I won’t waste my time and explain to you the paid software applications we were interested in purchasing. But rather, I will share with you what open source applications we have been able to use instead saving us an estimated about of $100,000 and counting. I say counting because unfortunately most paid software programs [...]

If you are running or planning to run a Drupal CMS driven website I want to suggest this cool module for you. It’s called the Drupal Administration Menu for Drupal which puts a cool looking dropdown menu at the top of your website when you are logged in to administer your website. For those of you who are familiar with Drupal, it can be difficult to use the default administration menu when managing content for your website. This plugin makes everything accessible with one click. As you can tell, it has a cool dropdown menu that allows you to access all administrative options easily (and it still looks cool!). This simple plugin will save you hours upon hours of administrative time with your Drupal CMS. Just go to the link above and locate the ‘Downloads’ section and download the latest release. Unpack the file and upload the admin_menu folder to [...]

Question and answer websites are becoming quite popular these days. A good example of this is Trulia Voices, a real estate tool where you can ask real estate related questions and get answers from professionals. Google is attempting to this on a much large level with it’s “Google Knol” application which is set to come out sometime soon. Although Google Knol is probably going to be a bit more like Wikipedia the overall concept is similar. On Trulia Voices, you can for example ask a specific question about real estate in Boise, Idaho and get an answer to your question from somebody who actually knows what they are talking about. A great combination of About.com and Social Networking! You will start seeing more and more of these Question & Answer Applications coming out, especially in niche industries like Real Estate to help provide gateways for people to have their questions [...]

The newest version of Open Office being 2.3.1 has a new capability that allows you to create an Open Document and then export that document into the popular MediaWiki syntax to help in the creation of wiki documents. For people familiar with using MediaWiki open source wiki platform this is most likely not a big deal. But as many are well aware of, training a non technical person how to use a MediaWiki is close to impossible. I have long discussed the importance of using a wiki within business organizations for documentation purposes. But if it takes forever to train your people on how to use that wiki than you can just forget about it. MediaWiki due to it’s high flexibility and level of complication has the ability to do many things. You can become extremely creative with MediaWiki as a content management system. Systems like Wikipedia.org are just the [...]

I am currently using a cool, easy to use form builder project for the Drupal content management system that is working very well for me at this time. It’s called Webform for Drupal. It allows you to create multiple customizable web forms for your website utilizing “Nodes” of content in the Drupal backend. If you just need a contact form and that’s it then you don’t need to worry at all about this module. Drupal comes with a contact module built in that just asks for name, email, and a question/comment. But if you are looking for the ability to have a more customized form, or need more than one form throughout your website then Webforms will work great for you. For example your website may need a contact form, request a project form, or a lead form for a free report that you are giving away. These are just [...]