jQuery

We're back from Boston DrupalCon 2008 and busy catching up with everything else. The site that I'm using this technique on will launch soon, but I wanted to share it now. Also, check out my Technorati Profile!

Drupal's Image module provides you with a pretty no-frills image gallery out of the box. In a site I was recently building, I wanted to present large imagery, but my main content column inside the site was somewhat cramped, and so I decided that some sort of Lightbox / Thickbox effect was in order to present the images to the user.

Luckily, with two extra modules and changing a single line of template.php code, you can get your gallery up and running with Lightbox.

jQuery's an amazing tool. You can accomplish great things with a single line of JavaScript. Here is one such snippet from a site I am working on for Bradley University. You can use this snippet to improve your navigation's usability.

Well-designed web navigation should tell you three things:

1. Where you are
2. Where you came from
3. Where you can go from here

Depending on the theme you choose, Drupal does a decent to good job of highlighting the active menu trail for you so that you can add in an extra graphical effect. Most themes do so by adding the .active CSS class.

There are some snippets out there that can assist you in making your theme friendlier in this regard: many of them involve adding a custom theme_links() function.

At the end of the day, though, there's still some things that could be done better. I subscribe to the school of thought that says that active menu items should not be clickable. After all, if you have a custom .active CSS class, you can style the active menu item to show the user where they are. You should not give the user the ability to click the Home link if they're already on the home page.