Planet Drupal

Publish your module code – It's the best thing for you and your customer

Back in 2007, my former employer and a current Mearra customer, Uusi Suomi, needed a way to measure and show what's hot and popular on their news site. We initially used Drupal's built-in node counter to list nodes ordered by daily page views. That worked for a while until we noticed the apparent weaknesses: 1) the counter gets reset once a day making near random content the most popular during the slow hours after midnight, and 2) the system favors content published near the reset time as the list feeds itself; people want to read content that other people have found interesting.

Can you offshore Drupal work?

The trend of offshoring IT work started during the 90s. Moving labour intensive programming tasks to low cost countries like India or China was considered as a great idea. It provided huge savings on projects that had millions of lines of code. Programmers were considered to be a factory: they just implemented designs done by architects. The way of working was identical if the programmers were sitting in the same room with architects, project managers and customers or on the other side of the world.

Update node status in comment by using Rules (How to create an issue tracker)

Ever wanted to change a field value of node by writing new comment and selecting proper options in comment form?
This post will guide you in creation of a issue tracker where status selection in comment will change status of parent node (issue).

Some tools to aid your Drupal admin pain

I think we have all felt the pain at least sometimes when doing admin tasks on the Drupal backend. Trying to find your way to the right admin page without knowing the correct path, trying to find some module in the modules page and activate it etc. With the built-in basic tools it can be pretty frustrating. But worry no more because here I present you some cool modules to aid your admin pain! Say hi to Administration menu, Aloha, Coffee and Module filter!

Why agile?

I think everybody and their dog should know something about agile development by now. Most companies seem to offer agile development at least on some level. Most customers say that they have at least some experience with agile. This being said it seems that many people are still missing the point of agile. Many suppliers are using agile mostly as sales pitch without really understanding it and many customer still insist on "fixed everything" contracts (fixed scope, price, schedule).

Becoming friends with the Drupal Color module — Part 2

This is a sequel to the post Becoming friends with the Drupal Color module — Part 1. Here we'll check out the advanced (and the coolest) parts of the Color module. If you are not already familiar with Color module, I suggest you take a look at Part 1 since I'm not going to cover the basics in this posts.

Drupal 7 and sites.php

You might have seen the example.sites.php file on the sites directory when setting up your Drupal installation. This is your new friend when setting up a multisite installation on Drupal.

The the g' old way of doing this was to create symlinks for each of the site into the sites directory. Like this:

Radioactivity 2: basics

With Radioactivity 2 nearly out of its beta form, I thought I'd write a bit about what it is and what you can do with it and most importantly walk you through on how to use it. Radioactivity 2 allows you to track any fieldable entities; users, nodes, commerce products, etc. It can be used as a simple view counter but also as a popularity or activity meter, e.g. with it you can create a 'most viewed nodes at this moment' list. There is also limited rules which allows you to create an activity meter for basically whatever you want.

Debugging and testing sites in Internet Explorer 7, 8 and 9 under Mac OS X and Linux.

Debugging and testing sites in Internet Explorer (or Exploder as some might say) is certainly the moment of joy in every web developers life. You know the saying test early, test often so you can identify issues and bugs early. How many of us actually do testing with Internet Explorer in the early stages?

Varnish device detection and redirect to mobile site

It's a fact: more and more people start using their smart phones and tablets for their browsing needs. This means that popular websites need to adapt their content for these new devices or face the chance of losing some of their users.

Today, I'll share how you can achieve device detection and redirect for a website that runs Varnish in 4 easy steps.

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