Du Vien Trang is a Freelance Web Designer / Developer based in Scotland. This is his portfolio, blog and his digital playground.

Dan from Inigo has kindly emailed me a link for a Drupal alternative admin panel called Rootcandy by Sotak. It is a customisable admin template that tries to tackle usability issues by rearranging the admin panel interface. Latest version now integrates with colour module (as used on the Garland theme) so users can change the colour of the admin panel to whatever suits them.  read more »

Drupal wins 2008 Webware 100 award -

[Drupal.org]

As a site becomes larger and fill with rich contents, it is vital to have a search feature that will make life easy for your end user to find what they want on your site.

Drupal is aware of this and has ensure the built in search can go beyond just merely listing contents on a page(s). It is now more smarter and more usable than before. Here are 12 patchs submitted by Robert Douglass. The list is impressive:  read more »

Businessweek picks Dries Buytaert as a 2008 top innovator

The business world is certainly starting to notice Drupal, as evidenced by this article in Businessweek naming Dries as a top 30-and-under innovator for 2008.

Make sure you have a solid business plan and you've done your homework and are passionate about what you are doing, and people will recognize your potential.

Businessweek talks about Drupal and Acquia, and mentions many of the great sites that have been built in Drupal. They cite the number of businesses using Drupal at being around 250,000.

Congratulations are in order to Dries and to all of you, the people who are working so hard to make Drupal a great product.

You can get a lot more out of Drupal, the software, if you engage with the Drupal community. This video shows you the first, easy step in that direction - getting an account on the drupal.org website. The video briefly discusses why you would want to do this, walks through the sign up process, then takes a quick tour through your account and shows some handy tools that you can enable.

This is the first video in what will be a small series about ways to get more involved and use the Drupal community resources.

Addison Berry from Lullabot

Check out the video tutorial from Lullabot

This module for Drupal 5 and 6 works like magic. Just find the text you want to replace and hey presto!, it auto-magically transforms the string (text) to your desire output without the need to find where to change it.  read more »

Below is a collection of 21 Drupal 5.x video tutorials for beginners:

A good friend of mine is getting married soon and have asked me to setup a small private site for them so they can make announcements and invitations to special friends and families. A photo gallery will be added later for invited guests and others that may not make it to the wedding party to view. I chose to use Drupal 6 as the site doesn't require any modules that hasn't been updated as yet and with the granular role permissions i can protect the whole site and only allow certain users access.  read more »

Yes, i got excited and just had to blog about this. Thanks to Naveenpl for recommending Search404 module. What's that? i hear you cry. It's a module to replace your error 404 pages (pages that does not exist on your site when someone tries to search for it by typing in a URL that does not exist). So search404 steps into play and tries to match what they are trying to search for.

Try this example: http://www.duvien.com/page/not/found  read more »

One great thing i like about Drupal is that it keeps pushing the boundaries. I was searching for a module that will allow me to create a customised search feature on a Drupal powered site and came across Faceted Search module.

I don't remember how but later i come across this 'Semantic Search - Faceted search & Web 3.0 for Drupal' and it's this that i want to talk about.  read more »