Facebook is rapidly taking over the planet, and Drupal is arguably trying to do the same. Facebook added the concept of 'liking' a webpage to their array of social tools a while ago. Drupal modules quickly added the ability to 'like' content on your site. This is all well and good, but what about getting some of that data back into Drupal? Suppose that you have an image gallery, and you want people to be...
So, it's perfectly valid to visit a site using a URL like: http://www.google.co.uk/////////// But some pesky SEO types will complain that the site is accessible at two URLs and that you need do a 301 redirect to the canonical URL (http://www.google.co.uk/). What you want to do is remove the trailing slashes using mod rewrite. If you really need to do this, then you can just pop the following in the .htaccess file that Drupal provides...
Aegir is a system for managing sites using Drupal and drush. We use it to manage this site in fact. However, we use a fairly old version. As a precursor to doing some more work on the backup management I wanted to get my head around the new version of Aegir, and the object orientedness. There's a really useful tutorial over on the Aegir community site: http://community.aegirproject.org/node/75 That shows you how to add options to...
ComputerMinds are proud to announce an exclusive shirt sponsorship deal with the BMF Bastardos "elite" touch rugby team. Playing in the Bristol touch league the Bastardos had a successful first season picking up the coveted wooden spoon ... luckily there is no proven correlation between touch rugby skills and Drupal development
If you're using Panels to display dynamic content, you might want to dynamically check whether to display the panes based on what will be shown. For example, if there is no content to show in a certain pane, you probably don't want the pane to show at all. You may especially want to do this if your theme will do anything ugly, or just unnecessarily conspicuous, with any HTML that is wrapping empty content. By...
ComputerMinds have moved! We are all settled in to our new offices on the triangle and are loving the new office - we just can't wait for the summertime so we can enjoy our courtyard (wi-fi has been tested and confirmed working - just need to figure out some kind of sun visor for the screens). Our new address is Lower Ground Floor, 20 Meridian Place, Clifton, Bristol, BS8 1JL Phone numbers etc remain the...
A little while ago I blogged about views content cache as a way to increase performance of your Drupal site. Today I released version 2.2 of the module, that adds lots of lovely features. The module has basically been re-written by Young Hahn from Development seed to provide a plugable mechanism for exposing cache segments. This means that any contrib module can contribute to keeping track of the what content has changed on the site...
Quite often you need to redirect a particular path on a Drupal site, there are a number of ways to do this, but most involve writing PHP code. Also, it's not hugely easy to do things like redirect node/%node but only when %node is a 'image' node, posted on a Tuesday. The awesome Page manager module, and a little utility module we wrote changes that. Page manager redirect Drupal module exposes a 'task handler' to...
Views is awesome. You get a ton of flexibility and power, but that comes at a price: Some of the queries that views produces are less than optimal, and the rendering of results can take a long time. Views 2.6 introduced a nice solution to some of the issues, with the introduction of caching plugins. Views itself comes with a single cache plugin (okay, okay two if you're really counting) that is time-based. So you...
Computerminds were due to attend the latest DrupalCon over in San Francisco, however Eyjafjallajokull had other ideas. With planes grounded and Europe at a standstill (in the air) we couldn't make it. However, an amazing bunch of people came together a couple of days before the start of Drupalcon proper to set up: DrupalVolCon London. DrupalVolCon was really cool, we watched the drupalcon keynotes from SF on a projector, and ate lots of pizza. We...