Web Development

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Chris
8 April, 2013 - 11:23
Today we have rolled out the newly released Drupal 7.22

Today we have rolled out the newest version of Drupal, released recently: Drupal 7.22. This update contains no new functionality and no security fixes, but we're committed to keeping Drupal up to date to ensure it's running smoothly.

This affects you if you have a Drupal 7 site with us, although there is nothing you need to do, and neither you nor your visitors will notice any difference when using your site.

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Chris
15 March, 2013 - 13:05
We all know about coding standards, but for some, they're an afterthought, not a way of life. Here's how to change that.

Writing standards-compliant code in Drupal 7 doesn't have to be hard! Using the power of a modern IDE, it can help to show you where you're going wrong, and ensure that all your code is standards-compliant. Here, we'll take a look at setting up JetBrains PhpStorm (our favourite IDE) to show you coding standards problems, but any IDE with CodeSniffer support will be able to do this, so it's likely Eclipse, NetBeans, and others will also help you out in the same way.

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Chris
12 February, 2013 - 13:23
Site-specific modules can be a bit tricky as there's no fixed structure to use, but we've come up with what we think is the ideal solution, and we thought we'd share!

It seems we're using an ever-increasing number of modules on our Drupal 7 sites, which are getting progressively more complex as clients (understandably) want more features, more eye candy and more value for their money. Some modules are downloaded from drupal.org, some are modified, some are written completely from scratch, and even features are modules. We've come up with a simple organisational method which we think ought to keep everything organised, and we thought we'd share this and let you have your say.

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Chris
7 September, 2012 - 16:10
Contextual filters in Drupal's views make it trivially easy to change a view based on the current path, but what if you are using the view in a block?

When using contextual filters in Drupal's views module, you can get information from the page's URL, and use it to affect the view. This works fine if your view is a page, such as a page of blog posts, but what if your view is a block, embedded somewhere else?

For example, what if you want to add a 'recent posts' block to each user profile, to show the top 10 posts they have made recently? By default, you wouldn't be able to do this, as views 3 in Drupal 7 cannot 'see' the page URL if the view is inside a block. Luckily there's a way round this.

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Craig
5 September, 2012 - 15:53
PhpStorm is a great PHP IDE, but did you know it can also debug JavaScript pretty well too? Here's how to debug scripts using Google Chrome as a host web browser.

PhpStorm is a great PHP IDE, but did you know it can also debug JavaScript pretty well too? Here's how to debug scripts using Google Chrome as a host web browser.

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Chris
25 June, 2012 - 16:01
There were so many good sessions at DrupalCamp Oxford that it was difficult to decide what to see. We've tried to summarise the things we brought back from the camp, and what we learned.

We just got back from DrupalCamp Oxford at the weekend, and there were a lot of good sessions. When you consider the ticket price was only £50 and included two 3-course lunches (both of which were way above and beyond the usual "Drupal event" food quality), it was a real bargain, but with so much information to take in, we thought we'd provide a quick summary of the key bits we took away from it.

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Craig
11 June, 2012 - 09:40
XDebug is a powerful debugging tool for PHP code. However, it's not quite clear how to configure it for use if the code you want to debug is inside a Vagrant instance.

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.

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Tom
21 May, 2012 - 16:13
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 suitabl

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.

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Wonderbag is a unique product and needed a unique site. We created a vivid interactive site using Drupal 7, crammed with interesting recipes and information.
Is it a beanbag? Is it a cat basket? No, it's a Wonderbag.

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.

Image: 
The National Skills Academy for Food and Drink got together with us because they needed to raise the profile of their web presence, and get more control over their own website. Drupal was a great solution.
The site has a lot of functionality, so keeping it all ordered and structured sensibly is a tough job. Drupal makes it easy to manage the sections on the site, and keep them looking great.

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.

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