I am working on a multilingual site which requires me to localize the date format for each enabled language.

Here are the available languages and their date formats:
* Spanish(es) - j de F, Y
* German(de) - j. F Y
* Japanese(ja) - Y年n月j日

In order to achieve this, I have enabled date_locale and its dependencies(date_api, locale).

Here are the steps that I took in order to localize the date format:
1) Navigate to "Site Configuration" > "Date and time" > "Formats" > "Add Format".
2) Create the custom format for Spanish and Japanese languages.

There are a number of Drupal modules that handle node access and which may address many requirements. However, using hook_node_grants() and hook_node_access_records(), you can also define in your own module which nodes a user can view, edit and delete.

There are a few things that come with the default Drupal 6 installation that our clients often asked to be changed. If you are building a Drupal site there's a good chance you'll encounter the same requests. As a result I have a list of items below to get you better prepared for your new project.

"I want this form to have these 3 fields in a group. Can we add as many of them as possible by clicking a button or something?"

Last time I posted a blog: "Using UUID and UUID_FEATURES modules Part 1" where I explained the basics of using UUID module to generate identity values.
The next thing you'll want to do is to use it in the real feature export components. Here is an example how we use it:
One of the projects I was working on needed locale languages support in taxonomy terms. Unfortunately, the exportable taxonomy component uuid_term provided by uuid_features module does not support i18n and is not exporting language & translation set fields.

The way these two fields are stored in the database are:

Here are a few ways to detect if the user is coming from a mobile device. Used for redirection, different interfaces, or special cases.

Javascript:

PROS: Most common solution.
CONS: Many mobile devices don't support Javascript or users turn it off.

<script>
  var isMobile = navigator.userAgent.match(/(iPhone|iPod|iPad|Android|BlackBerry)/);
</script>

Here at Appnovation, we frequently use the Acquia hosting platform for our clients. The Dev Cloud and Managed Cloud are impressive platforms that fit well for many Drupal sites being built today. I’ve listed some items below that have helped with the overall build quality and ease of use for these platforms.

Utilities - Drush aliases

While we all wait for multi-column layouts with CSS3 to become standard across all browsers, we have to put our faith in js to help us solve our column problems. Here are two things I like to use.

Columnizer

After the launch of Canopy, we here at Appnovation started to think about what other systems we could integrate with Drupal. Enter Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM).

In order to get this started we needed to install and configure Oracle UCM and all of its dependencies (it had many!). Here are the steps we took in order to prepare the environment for our testing purposes.

One of the best aspects about Drupal is its interoperability. Drupal can be integrated with almost all systems(CMS/ECM/DM)out there. There are so many ways to import content from other systems to Drupal. How you implement it will depend on some factors(budget, time constraint, 3rd party system constraints). If you need to consume a JSON feed and convert them into nodes, try using feeds module in conjunction with feeds_jsonpath_parser module. Use feeds to consume data from a given URL and feeds_jsonpath_parser to traverse through the JSON data and map elements to CCK fields.

As someone new to Drupal I was given a book to read and review from the team at Appnovation. The title is Drupal 7 Fields/CCK by Dave Poon, and with this post I will cover some initial impressions as I read through the first few chapters.