Insights

The addition of Fields in Drupal 7 core has created quite a shakeup in the modules that interact with fields and create new kinds of fields. In Drupal 6 they were all CCK field modules, but now many of them have changed names or been replaced completely with new modules that better leverage the Drupal 7 entity concept. Over the last few month, these five modules have become some of my favorites for those sites that need more complexity in the fields that are created and how they relate to one another.

References

The References module contains the ‘node reference’ and ‘user reference’ modules that were separate in Drupal 6. There are two other approaches to this same idea in the Relation and Entity Reference modules, but I find this module just works the way I expect without any headache even though it’s only a beta.

How much do you trust your customers? If you’re Sweden, apparently it’s a lot — it’s giving its citizens access to the @Sweden Twitter account. Each week as part of Curators of Sweden, a single citizen will be given exclusive access to the account, with carte blanche for posting. Is this a recipe for success, or disaster?

Often I have a client who needs a lot of words on the page. At first glance, I feel like I can condense the message — but just as often, the nature of my client's industry requires specific language. Good design and marketing practices tell me to have a short page to read, but when I try to edit the page, there isn't much content I can trim (especially when there are product features or legally-required points to cover).

Thank you again to everyone who joined us for the Writing Content for the Web webinar. If you want to see it again, or if you missed it the first time around, check out the slides and transcript available below. And let us know what you think in the comments!

An early new year’s resolution for me is to become more involved in the Drupal community. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for months, but Angie “webchick” Byron’s keynote at DrupalCamp Austin on November 19 gave me the tangible steps and motivation to jump in. It has been a lot easier to get involved than I anticipated.