Magento, the awesome ecommerce software that recently released their 1.0 stable, is interested in integration with Drupal.

I think Magento is great and it should be possible to integrate with Drupal, but to make this work well would be a very complex project.

The level of integration that you would want in such a combo is probably most closely matched by vbdrupal. VbDrupal is very powerful but also quiet a resource hog. Disclaimer: I last used VbDrupal about a year ago so maybe it's not slow anymore. A Drupal-fork would also be undesirable.

In the relevant Drupal group a proposal was posted for the integration but I think such a proposal should be preceded by a research of the feasibility of the integration and an analysis of what would be gained/lost on both ends (mage/drupal) when they are integrated.

Introduction

Disclaimer: The absolute numbers here are not representative for loadtimes of either application on your server.
The thing we're looking for here is how results compare to eachother.

Hardware:
-Acer Aspire 7720G l
-Intel Core 2 du0 T5250 with Santa Rosa chipset (1.5Ghz 667MHz FSB 2MB L2 cache)
-2GB DDR2

Software
-XAMPP package with Zend Optimzer disabled
-No opcode caching enabled
-MySQL query caching enabled with default settings
-Windows Vista running classic theme (yes vista is lame, I know)

-SVN checkout of joomla 1.5
-CVS checkout Drupal 6.1
-Jmeter
-Apache Benchmark

Part 1: Testing for load times with Jmeter

Test Setup:

The purpose of this contest is to get a really nice design, to be used as a premium drupal theme, and to scout for hot designer talent for future work.

Take a look over at 99designs (from Sitepoint) to read the details and following the contest: http://99designs.com/contests/5944

No! I haven't posted on the blog in a while, but fact is I'm busier than ever and the stuff I'm working on is something that is going to change the landscape of Drupal theming greatly.

Besides doing client work, I have been working on premium Drupal themes to be sold on ADT. As far as I know, 2 other companies are doing the same thing. One of them is SEO Position, and the other is a new company that is going to take on the theme shortage with a huge effort, let's call this new start-up TNT for now. You'll learn more about them in the near future. (ps TNT is not owned by me).

The themes line of ADT is going to cater the market for omnipotent highly flexible themes that come with a high degree of configurability and generic but extendible designs, while the other 2 are going to provide a collection of niche templates.

I have no view on when ADT is going to launch it's premium themes but it's going to be at least 2 months, the first theme is still in an early stage of development (design), but the concept and technolgy is already tried and tested.  

I normally don't announce theme releases anywhere but this one is
special. I've worked hard to make this theme work well and the xhtml
template I was porting was well-coded as well.

This drupal theme will be a nice addition to the drupal theme repository, it doesn't look too
flashy and it can easily be used as a theme for small business
websites. What makes this theme special is it's high flexibility and
configurability, this theme properly supports 1, 2 or 3 columns
layouts, and it gets even better... The themes layout width is
completely configurable, you can set it as a fixed width in pixels or
as a fluid width, that being a percentage of the browser window width.
You can also set the width of the main content area. The main content
area is set to be a percentage of the total layout width, and when you
change it the sidebar(s) will automatically assume the leftover width.

Enough talking, heres some stuff in list form:

Bullit proof

• Doesn't break any drupal admin pages, or get broken by admin pages
• small backend interface improvements
• all structural and contextual layout blocks are flex-height (don't break when upscaling the font)

Fast

• Theme Images weigh a combined 1,6kb
• Style.css weighing in at 4.4kb
• Output HTML is just as minimal (full html output size varies with content)

Custom Theme options:

• set a fixed or fluid width layout
• adjust the % of
  width the main content area will take up and the sidebar(s) will
  automagically resize to fill up the leftover space
• subheader and navbar region are dispensable, to get an even cleaner layout!

Supported native drupal elements:

• 1,2 or 3 columns!
• main content / sidebar width configurable through theme options
• blocks
• primary menu
• secondary menu
• logo (including optional ie PNG fix for transparent backgrounds)
• logotext
• slogan
• mission

Tested to work with:

• Internet explorer 7
• Internet explorer 6
• Firefox
• Opera 9
• Safari (Safari for windows)
• Netscape 9

I'll commit the theme to drupal cvs after I get some sleep but you can already download it at my drupal themes section.

It's easy to create a custom node with CCK, but what if we want to change how the node looks by default? It's a step up from theming your submitted and your terms code, but it's not really that hard. The main difference between theming the CCK node and the regular node is that in node.tpl.php, we have several content sections within a node, so rather than just printing $content, we will print out parts of the content individually. I will use code from the wallpaper node type of this site for my examples.

Step 0, before we get to the phptemplate part of this tutorial, you have to think to yourself if you really need to theme a specific node programmatically. In many cases, you can style a node just fine with CSS only, so first imagine how you want to theme your node and determine if you really need to get into the templating engine.

Subsequently, we need to create a template file for our node type, make a copy of your themes node.tpl.php and rename it node-typename.tpl.php. In the case of my wallpaper node on this site that will be node-dwall.tpl.php.

This tutorial will outline the steps to create and awesome looking taxonomy menu, using Imagecache, Taxonomy Image, Views, and some SQL. I will make this blog post the first one to be labeled ‘expert' in my skill level taxonomy, but that's really just there to look cool ;). I will explain the code step by step, and if afterwards, all 11 (!) lines of code make no sense at all, you can copy and paste the code.

Prerequisites:

In this tutorial, we will be adding a container with metadata about your node to our node template. To see what I mean, look at the bottom of this node page. Code snippet is plug-and-play, so you can plug it right into your custom theme, or one of my own Drupal themes.

The box in question can contain any node information we want, such as link information, to ensure the blogosphere can link to us effortlessly, or statistical data about our node (hits etc.).

For starters, we're going to add a simple container to our node that contains a html link, a BBcode link, and the trackback url of our node. Open up your node.tpl.php file, and add a new div element at the end:

If you haven't heard of Magento yet, it's the new open source ecommerce platform that's going to blow ubercart and oscommerce out of the water! A stable version has not yet been released but yet their sourcecode has already been downloaded over 100,000 times. The stable 1.0 version is planned to be releaed in the first quarter of 08, so it won't be long until we see magento shops spawning allover the web. You can check out the demo here

Magento is also going to be integrated with Drupal...

This article is the sequel to my first drupal adsense article. This time we're going to put adsense blocks in between teasers, on for example our frontpage. Same as last time, this does not require any modules, nor does it depend on adsense, it works with any phptemplate-based theme and with all sorts of ad code.

For starters, we're going to create a new block region. If there is not a template.php file in your theme folder, create one and open it up. See if there is a block regions function, if there is, add a new block to it: 'betwteasers' => t('between teasers')

If you didn't find a block region function copy this code into your template.php file (this code should be in between <?php and ?> tags):

function yourtheme_regions() {
return array(
'right' => t('right sidebar'),
'left' => t('left sidebar'),
'content' => t('content'),
'header' => t('header'),
'footer' => t('footer'),
'subnav' => t('subnav'),
'betwteasers' => t('between teasers'),
);
}