Recently we were passed a large existing project developed in Drupal 5, and asked to make modifications to it pending a full upgrade of the site to Drupal 7. Given the age of the code and the fact that Drupal 5 has been unsupported for some time, none of the development teams machines had the necessary tools to work on it. What we needed was effectively an old machine with an old copy of Ubuntu to develop it on.

Recently I was tasked with coming up with a system for redirecting users to the correct version of a translated site based on where they were accessing the site from. Having spent some time looking on Google and Drupal.org I did not find anything suitable and so decided to write my own which I am now sharing due to the lack of resources on this subject.

Wonderbag is a unique product that needed a unique site. Drupal 7 put us in a great position to come up with something special, featuring huge amounts of evocative imagery, especially where food is concerned, along with a whole bunch of social content and interactivity.

The site integrates with Twitter and Facebook, and allows users to participate in discussions on the site itself. It contains a recipe index where users can submit their own recipes for moderation, and an online shop selling the Wonderbags themselves.

The National Skills Academy for Food and Drink needed an improved online presence, with more interactivity, stronger visuals, and more control over their own content. As they had a lot of content and a very long potential features list, we went on a few trips to York to sit with their team and get a feel for what they needed.

Sportsbeat needed a strong online presence and they wanted to accomplish this with a strong brand and bold visual style on their new site. We put together a site that feels modern to use, keeps the content straightforward, but engages the user and makes the user want to explore.

The inner pages include a team page where each team member's information can be viewed, a work page where each case study can be enlarged and flicked through, magazine style, and a grid of company logos to show off Sportsbeat's list of high-profile clients.

The Dyslexia-SpLD Trust came to us because their existing self-assessment framework was inflexible and costly to maintain. We had a track record of building custom web applications using Drupal 7, so we sat down with them to discuss what they needed.

Initially we looked at the quiz module for self-assessment, but due to their need to have a confidence level, as well as a particular response, for each statement, we decided to build something from scratch using Drupal's Entity system and its excellent views integration.

On 26th May 2012, new law will come into effect that changes the rules for websites that store cookies. It's meant to give users the opportunity to opt into having cookies put on their devices, rather than the opt-out system that is currently in place. If you have a Drupal website with us, it's fairly likely you'll be affected by this, so what do you need to do, and what is it that we'll be doing?

Drupal 6 has a lot of database API commands, although one common task that continues to come up is how to get results out of a query more than once, without repeating the query. I've not seen this documented elsewhere so I thought it was worth noting.

Why bother?

Excellent question. Shouldn't I have written a better query? Our need was to go through the resultset from the db_query and work out the highest and lowest values, then, perform some complex maths on each row that depended on knowing the highest and lowest values.

Today we are pleased to announce a new release of the Wildfire platform for Drupal 6 and 7. Many requested changes, fixes and updates have been included in this release, but the most striking is the overhaul of the broadcast send page.

We'd like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! We will be open for business until Thursday 22nd December 2011. The office will be closed on Friday 23rd December, and we'll open again on 3rd January 2012.