Drupa give

We are really excited to be a gold sponsor for the Bristol Drupalcamp. The event takes place on the 3rd and 4th of July and we will hopefully be bringing some super exciting drupal powered remote control cars - watch this space!

Previously on this website I have written about rendering blocks programmatically and adding things to content to be managed alongside fields. It's time to combine the two! On many projects, we find ourselves needing to render a block consistently across all content of a certain type. For example: Are you trying to place advertising blocks or fixed javascript code between the fields in the content of a page, not just shoved into regions around the...

If you have a Drupal 7 site, then you should be using the [Entity cache][ec] module, here's why: Lots and lots of things in Drupal are 'entities', such as the content, the users, the taxonomy terms and if you're using contrib modules like [Field collection][fc] or [ECK][eck], then those are entities too. Most of the time you have some fields on those entities, then every time Drupal needs to load one up, it'll also have...

There are a few write-ups about using Aegir to automate your deployment process notably one from Mig5: Zero-touch Drupal deployment with Jenkins, Aegir, Git, Fabric and Drush. I recently wanted to set this up for our own project, but felt like I could make some improvements. I don’t like deploying branches, because it can be really hard to actually find out what was deployed at a later date, and you can’t reliably re-deploy that previous...

Drupal 7 fields are great, but using multiple valued fields and [field collection][fc] you can quickly reach the point of having a form that looks like this: In this contrived example I've got two field collections and a multi-valued 'Links' field within that. Although it's reasonably clear what clicking 'Add another item' will do in each case, when the form is full of data it can become less so. We...

[Drupal Science Camp][dsc] was the first Drupalcamp in the UK of 2012. It was wonderfully organised by [Rachel Lawson][rl] and [Euan Bayliss][eb] at a magnificent venue provided free of charge by Napp Pharmaceuticals Limited. Computerminds had the privilege of being one of the sponsors of the event. It was great to be able to support a weekend of learning and general Drupal fun. We'd like to say a big thank you everyone involved with the...

Drupal 7 ships with a module called 'Overlay', it is installed by the standard install profile and actually is pretty great for most people. If you don't know what I'm talking about then, it's this: It's basically a nice wrapper around the [jQueryUI Dialog component][jquery_ui_dialog] and has some nice features, like keeping the URL fragment up to date with the page being viewed in the overlay. This means you can create a link that...

If you are free on the weekend of the 21st and 22nd and are anywhere near Cambridge (the UK one!) then make your way to the Drupal Science Camp. The details on their website are a little sparse so far, but it's shaping up to be an interesting little event - plus ComputerMinds are sponsoring it, so it's got to be good :) Tickets are a measly £10 each, and it looks like there is...

We are all very excited about DrupalCon coming to London (well London-ish - http://london2011.drupal.org/conference/venue ) - and now that we are Silver sponsors we are literally jumping for joy ... now we just need to think of something to put on our very own exhibitor table ...

[Aegir][aegir] is a very clever hosting system for [Drupal][drupal] that sites and provisions them on various servers and does lots of clever things. One of the clever things that it has had for a while is a task queuing system. You can ask Aegir to lots of different things all in one go, and Aegir will queue them up and run them at its own pace. This provides a really good separation from the front-end...