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According to Wikipedia, particle systems are:

“The term particle system refers to a computer graphics technique to simulate certain fuzzy phenomena, which are otherwise very hard to reproduce with conventional rendering techniques. Examples of such phenomena which are commonly replicated using particle systems include fire, explosions, smoke, moving water, sparks, falling leaves, clouds, fog, snow, dust, meteor tails, hair, fur, grass, or abstract visual effects like glowing trails, magic spells, etc.”

In Moldeo, you can implement particle systems in your projects. You just need to add the particle system plug-in to your project and enable it. I will walk show you how to modify a project with a particle system, and how its main parameters work.

First, open the Simples Project in the Examples Menu of Moldeo Director. After opening the file, you have to disable the icon (just to make the project more clear).

Then, open the parameters page of the particle effect by clicking on the particlesimple effect on the Project tab. The first parameter to modify is maxage, which in miliseconds defines how long the different particles will be displayed.

For instance, change maxage to 10,000 (10 seconds)

Then change the emitionrate up to 20. This parameters tells the system how many particles will be created on every emitionperiod which defines in milliseconds how long it takes to create the particles. Change the emitionperiod up to 100 (0.1 seconds)

If you would like to create the particles at a faster pace, change randomvelocity up to 200 and see what happens. You can also try different values; such as 2, 5, 10 and 100 for the parameters randomvelocityx, randomvelocityy and randomvelocityz.

Then you can change other parameters, such as height and width in order to make your particles smaller or larger.

Don’t feel afraid to modify different parameters and have fun with it.

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When I started developing with Drupal, I always found myself creating an admin role. Then each time I added a new module I had to add the new permissions to the administrator role I created. It is not that bad but it is kind of annoying having to do that every day. Besides, sometimes I forgot to add the permissions to the role, which made some tests fail.

Then the Admin role module came to the rescue. What this module does is assign a role the administrator role. Then every time you add a module, it automatically adds those permissions to the admin role. This will allow you have more than one user with the “user 1″ superpowers, which in Drupal means the user has the same power of the root user in a Linux server.

This module is widely used. So instead of having a Drupal 7 pledge it is being included in Drupal 7 as part of the core. So Kudos to the admin module development!

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I knew Drupal thanks to OpenPublish. I had a client who needed to have a website with online publishing capabilities. And reading the OpenPublish documentation I realized that it was going to fit my client’s needs. So after downloading it, translating it and making minor fixes to the theme, I had the website running in almost no time. And my client was (and still is) very happy with it.

I will not go into detail on the features of OpenPublish. I will just say that it fits most of the use cases of small and medium publishers in Latin America. There are many reasons for choosing a Drupal distribution versus starting a site from scratch. The most important reason to me was that I had a system running out-of-the-box.  It saved me lots of weeks of work figuring out how to configure the different modules and make them work. In the case of OpenPublish, it also semantic web functionality embedded, such as the OpenCalais module (which is very nice).

Downsides of using Drupal distribution? Well, maintaining it might be really hard, I would say that with some distributions you need to be prepared to take over the maintenance of your installed distribution once you install it. But that depends on the distribution itself. I don’t picture myself maintaining OpenAtrium, and OpenScolar.

Thing is, we need to get used to distributions. We can’t start websites from scratch and most of these distributions already make the right decisions for most of the client’s use cases.

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Administration menu, or admin_menu, is one of those modules that saves Drupal users, administrators and developers tons of hours. It renders the navigation menu on top of your page, independently of the theme. Which is really good and saves a lot of time since it makes finding the administration options very easy.

It also saves you of having to deal with the navigation  block enabled on every page in case you need to access the administrative options of Drupal.

This module has a Drupal 7 pledge, and IMHO should be part of core.

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Drush is, as the project website describes, a a command line script and shell interface for Drupal. If you are a Drupal developer pretty soon you end up using this tool. If you are a Drupal website administrator, the sooner you use it the more productive you are.

This “module” has a Drupal 7 pledge, so don’t worry about its upgrade and start using right away, that’s my advice.

Why use it? Lots of reasons. The main reason I use it is it simplifies my life while maintaining a Drupal site. Prevents lots of errors due to typing errors or working on wrong directories (just to give you two examples). Also it is the first step towards the automation of Drupal maintenance. For instance, the Drush Make extension, which can create a ready-to-use drupal site, pulling sources from various locations.

Drush detects your site based on your directory context. Let’s say your command shell is in /home/mysite/sites/all, it will read your config file from /home/mysite/sites/default/settings.php.

Some examples of using this tool are:

# drush dl drupal (downloads the latest stable version of Drupal)

# drush dl cck views (downloads the latest stable versions of cck and views)

# drush enable views (enables the views module)

# drush disable views (disables the views module)

# drush cron (runs all cron hooks)

How to install it? Well, it is not a Drupal module, you have to install it in a different way. These are the instructions for installing Drush on Ubuntu.

Well, it makes a lot of sense using this tool, so don’t hesitate to install and use it.

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After using this module, you should also use Scribe SEO Analyzer. This module analyzes your nodes and tell the content writer how to tweak the content in order to get more search traffic.

This module is paid for and maintained by Volacci, the Drupal SEO company. One of the members of the Volacci team wrote the book Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization. A very interesting book with good insights on how to improve your site visibility. Specially chapter number 2, it is a must read.

But at the end of the day, it is all about content. In order to draw traffic to your site, you need good content. You can not avoid that.

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Views Nivo Slider is a an Image Slider based on the jQuery library. IMHO, it is one of the nicest image slider available for Drupal. Even though configuring it might not be intuitive the first time, this wonderful module has plenty of documentation and examples. So Kudos to the module development team!

Well… I would like to recommend this module in case you need an image slider in your front page (or landing page). It made one of my clients very happy, and again. I would like to congratulate the team for not only the module, but also for its documentation.

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Just found an interview on Q&A

I was surprised when he said “The finest writer I was ever given the chance to meet was the great legendary Jorge Luis Borges“. It was a very nice surprise to me.

Again, can’t wait to read his book. I certainly enjoyed the movie “Up in the air” (which is based on his novel) and I am certain I will enjoy his books

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In my humble opinion, should be part of core. But since this module already has a Drupal 7 pledge, we are OK with the situation as it is (actually there are so many modules that are part of core, problem is upgrading core would be suuuch a huge task…)

Well, pathauto automatically generates an URL path alias every time you create a node or object. It does so according to a set of defined rules or patterns, which can be found and set at:

• For 5.x: Administer > Site Configuration > Pathauto
• For 6.x: Administer > Site Building > URL aliases, in the “Automated alias settings” tab.
• For 7.x: Administer > Configuration > Search and Metadata > URL aliases, in the “Patterns” tab.

You can also modify the created path just by editing the node. Having the URL path created according to a set of rules, allows your site to be more user and search engine friendly. Which is really good these days.

A warning, having pathauto running on your site does not mean you have to do the proper information architecture work. Sooner or later your site will be a mess if don’t do a proper information architecture planning job.

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As stated in the Drupal website, Simplenews publishes and sends newsletters to lists of subscribers. It is one of my favorite modules, the reason being that it is quite easy to configure and very powerful once you use it. If your client needs a newsletter solution that integrates with Drupal, Simplenews might be the answer.

It is easy to install, just download the module, unzip it in the sites/all/modules directory, then enable it and done. You just need to configure it. By default it creates a newsletter taxonomy and a newsletter issue content type. All you have to do is create a newsletter in the configuration menu, assign a content type to it, and that’s it. You are ready to send newsletters with your Drupal site.

You only need to have your mail system in your server properly configured. You can also complement its funtionality with a long list of modules, such as:

• Simplenews Content Selection (for selecting which nodes to send)
  
• Simplenews Template (for adding headers, footers and personalized stylesheets to different newsletters)
• Simplenews Analytics (for adding Google Analytics tags to links in all Simplenews emails)

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