As most of you are probably aware, Drupal is the best PHP Open Source Content Management System. Most serious big players in the web industry always prefer Drupal over any other CMS applications, mainly because Drupal is more powerful and reliable. But after trying both Drupal & Joomla, I feel like Drupal is really flexible and reliable. But when it comes to user friendliness, Drupal is way behind Joomla. Drupal is such a good CMS system, but it’s not that easy for a beginner to learn it himself. Drupal documentation is not up to the mark for a beginner. So it requires extensive research and lot of googling to master Drupal yourself.

A few months ago, I started learning Drupal theming – I found myself spending a lot of time searching Google for answers to my basic doubts about Drupal. Being self taught, I thought I will archive these questions that troubled me and took up so much of my time. I hope this post would save some Drupal enthusiast some precious time.

Well, here are the questions – go ahead and read

How do I access the Drupal admin panel, when the login block is disabled?

This is really a common question among Drupal beginners; we need not always want the login block to be displayed in our site. Since most of these cases the login block will be turned off in the administration. In those cases, we can access the login screen simply through the following URL.

1

http://sitename.com/?q=user

or if the clean URL is enabled

1

http://sitename.com/user

Similarly if you can’t access the logout link and need to logout, you can do so by using the URL

1

http://sitename.com/?q=logout

alternatively with clean URLs enabled you can try

1

http://sitename.com/logout

How to make my Drupal site offline to public, while it is under construction?

You can set your Drupal site in off-line mode, while it is being developed. Just click Administer » Site maintenance. There you can set the status to off-line. If you wants, you can also set your own custom off-line message. When set to Off-line, only users with the administer site configuration permission will be able to access your site to perform maintenance; all other visitors will see the site off-line message configured there. Authorized users can log in during Off-line mode directly via the user login page. Read the rest of this entry »

Lord Hanuman also referred to as Bajrang Bali in Sanskrit is one of the most popular concepts of devotees of God in Hinduism and one of the most important personalities in the Great Indian epic Ramayana. He is considered as the 11th avatar (incarnation) of Lord Shiva. Hanuman is considered the most powerful and intelligent amongst divine beings. His most famous feat, as described in the Ramayana, was leading an army of monkeys to fight the demon King Ravana.

The monkey god, Hanuman is a noble hero and great devotee of Lord Rama, the hero of Ramayana. Hanuman is considered as the provider of power, courage, hope, knowledge, intellect and devotion.

The picture of hanuman holding a mace (gadha) in his robust hands is always been a sign of bravery and inspiration for us Indians. Being an ardent devotee of Lord Hanuman, I always find pleasure in collecting wallpapers and illustrations of this power packed Monkey. Here is such a wonderful collection of some of those amazing illustrations of Lord Hanuman, created by some of the finest digital artists across the world. All of these images are linked to its original source.

Read the rest of this entry »

It is said that 70 to 80 percentage of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. A major portion of this time is exhausted on downloading all the external components in a web page including, stylesheet, images, scripts, flash etc. An extra HTTP request adds 200+ milliseconds to a page (worldwide average). Since most of today’s browsers limit about 3 or 4 parallel requests at a time, a page with so many external references can cause the requests to get queued up. This may eventually cause the page loading time to increase. In short, the fewer files the web browser has to fetch that much faster the site loads. It’s as simple as that.

What is CSS sprite?

CSS sprites can be termed as a method for reducing the number of image requests to a web page by combining multiple images into a single image, and display the desired segment using CSS background-image and background-position properites. Now that almost all major browsers started supporting CSS background-image and background-position properties, CSS sprites are getting more significance.

Cool Sprites – Free Pure CSS menu for download

Here I am presenting a cool overlapped pure CSS menu created using CSS sprites. This is an initial draft version, so far I have checked it only in Firefox 3.5, IE 7, Chrome 3.0 & Opera 9.02 and it looks fine. If anyone of you finds any issues in any other browsers, please lemme know. Cool sprites is a pack of four different versions of the same menu. The photoshop source is also available for download, so that you can customize it as per your need. Since this menu is largely dependent on the background image, you need to customize the image to alter the link label, color, size etc.

Cool Sprites – LIVE PREVIEW

Read the rest of this entry »