March 2008

One main quirk I've had with using Drupal (and other Open Source CMSs for that matter), is that when I need to do some heavy maintenance and take a site down, the default 'site offline' message looks pretty mickey mouse and though I'm proud of using Drupal, I'd rather have my own logo, if one at all, when people see that my site is down - I mean, it looks as if they've reached some page they shouldn't have and something's seriously messed up.

Well, you don't have to waste much time pondering these things like I have - there are two approaches in Drupal 5 that let you beautify the site offline message, and I recommend you read this post:

http://drupal.org/node/58562

About 2/3 of the way down the page you'll see mention of a simple template.tpl.php include which will redirect people to a custom/static page or URL but still allow you to access site login/admin pages. :)

Last note: supposedly Drupal 6 includes phptemplate theming for the maintenance page; I'll try it out and post back soon.

Its funny how often people remark; "I don't know about Drupal - all the sites people make with it, well, look like Drupal!"  Such observations are usually the result of a developer not taking that extra step to override some default blurbs and titles that Drupal comes with out of the box.

Now, overriding Drupal's strings has been quite the pain until recently because you'd have to wrap your head around php and then come up with some snippet including a hook and so on..  Well, thanks to Khalid @ 2bits today I got twigged onto a new module which makes overrides a dream.  This great module is simply titled 'String Overrides' and comes ready to transform your Drupal 5 and 6 experience.  Yay!

Here's a demo video from Rob Loach: