Alexander on Web Development

I need to construct a newsticker for Diálogo Digital. We have been re-redesigning our news site for about 8 weeks now (except for the web designer that prepared the plain HTML/CSS files) I am alone. Initially I felt inclined to use a community provided (contrib) module, but here were my options:

• http://drupal.org/project/newsticker It is built for Drupal 6, uses JQuery's serialscroll plugin, outputs the newsticker into a block. Does not use Drupal's node system.

• http://drupal.org/project/views_ticker Built for Drupal 5 only, so it wasn't really an option.

When I was writing the last article for alexanderallen.name, I felt (once again) an urgent need to use a node teaser and body separation feature while using a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor in Drupal.

I don't know, but they are still very popular amongst my clients. Everyone wants one (a tag cloud). We'll guess what I found out...

There's a Drupal module called Cumulus that creates a flash based flashy looking tag cloud, which depends on the Tagadelic module. Installation sure was easy, although it required three diferent downloads. One for the Tagadelic module, another for the Cumulus module, and another one for the JavaScript file that creates the actual flash movie. However, the two or five minutes this might take depending on skill are sure worth the effort.