Devblog

Automatic font resizing on iPhone / iPad

Andy — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:21:06 +0000

Our new company website has just gone live and on some pages the layout was broken on the iPhone and iPad. This was due to it’s minimum font size feature.

You can disable this by adding this to your CSS

div, p, a, li, td { -webkit-text-size-adjust:none; }

iPlayer on iPhone App

Andy — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:28:51 +0000

Just got to Asda and the little one was asleep so I volunteered to stay in the nice warm car watching Frozen Planet on the BBC iPlayer.

They’ve now updated it so that you can watch using 3G instead of just wifi which is great because I don’t have to go out in the cold, wind and rain but can just watch polar bears instead

Drupal Commerce: first impressions

Andy — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 01:57:52 +0000

I’ve been running an online shop for a year now which hasn’t really taken off due to a mixture of lack of time and secondly, hating OSCommerce that it’s running on.

Having spent a large portion of the last year using Drupal 7 for work I decided to re-develop the shop using that. I check it out and two main options for contributed modules to provide the shop functionality came up: UberCart and Drupal Commerce. I started with Ubercart since I’d heard with it and it was more established, however I didn’t like some aspects of it and after an update, it crashed the site. So I installed the Drupal Commerce module and started to play with that.

The standard configuration was easy enough being a mix of Drupal knowledge and the fundamentals of commerce software. After that it was a case of adding my 250+ products. This is where the first bit of confusion came in. Drupal Commerce works by having a content type called Product Display which can have fields in the same way as other nodes, but also has within the shop Products which are completely seperate and have their own set of fields. It seemed a little confusing at first since I didn’t get why you’d want double entry – having to add the product with the price etc as a Product and then add it again as a Product Display with a description.

After more reading I found out that the seperation of product and display is due to a feature that I specifically needed. My shop sells lingerie and as such each item I sell has options for size and sometimes, colour. In the real world these can be considered seperate products, they are different – you can’t send a green one out if the customer has requested red. So with Drupal Commerce you add each option as a seperate Product and then add a Product Display for all of the different options. The Product Display node can then be used to create the site, either as part of a menu, tagged with taxonomy to create product categories or however you would normally use Drupal to create your site.

The benefit though is when you arrive on the Product Display node. Drupal Commerce can then take all the different Products and create option dropdowns so a customer can select the size and colour they want and then add to basket. That chosen Product is then added to their order.

I’m not sure if this may be annoying for shops where there are no options and you have to add a Product and then Display for each item, but if it is and you have quite a few products then there’s always Commerce Feeds to the rescue. This is a module that utilises the Drupal Commerce and Feeds modules to allow you to use CSV files or other formats and import them directly into Drupal.

So far I’ve got the 1,000+ Products added. Tomorrow night I’ll look at the 250+ Product Displays.

First impressions: impressed

Strange problem when creatng Drupal 7 Module form_submit and db_update

Andy — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 17:03:21 +0000

Today we were creating a new custom module in Drupal and we had a form we had created and a submit handler. In the submit handler we had a db_update to update the row in the database. For ages we couldn’t find out why it wasn’t working until we noticed we’d set the update variables using

$form_state['values']['name']

This is wrong. This stores the values of the form fields as they were when the form was generated. To get the values of the fields as they were submitted, you need:

$form_state['input']['name']

One of those things that takes hours to spot! ARRRGGHH!!!

Drupal 7: Get the tpl.php name of a certain View

Andy — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 15:17:55 +0000

I was trying to theme a certain view in a D7 site since I couldn’t get Views to do what I needed without using my own PHP and jQuery.

It took me ages to track down what name to use in the tpl file for my theme. The easiest way of finding out what tpl.php name to use, either for a single view, type of view (e.g. unformatted list) or all views is to go into:

Structure > View > Edit your view

Then under Advanced of the right you will find a “Theme: Information” link that gives you extensive information on the files in use. Enjoy.

Drupal 7 doesn’t use tpl files for nodes or content types

Andy — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 12:45:17 +0000

If you are copying the default page.tpl.php to use for either a specific node or a specific content type but Drupal is ignoring it there are usually two main reasons:

tpl file name
If you are used to the D6 naming conventions, be aware it has changed in D7. The new naming conventions are here
Preprocess function
You may have forgotten to put a preprocess hook in your theme file. For example I have this in most of my Zen sub themes:
function MYTHEME_preprocess_page(&$variables, $hook) { //some other stuff if (isset($variables['node'])) { $variables['theme_hook_suggestions'][] = 'page__type__'. $variables['node']->type; $variables['theme_hook_suggestions'][] = "page__node__" . $variables['node']->nid; }
}

Hope that helps

Updating Drupal 7 Core using Drush

Andy — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 15:37:46 +0000

If you want to save the hassle of upgrading Drupal 7 core from say, 7.4 to 7.7, you can install Drush and then use it from SSH to back up your site and then update core with the follwoing command:drush update
Just make sure you’re in the directory of the Drupal installation you want to update.

How to delete individual items from OS X Trash

Andy — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 08:48:58 +0000

I recently ran out of hard disk space and figured the best way of getting some back quickly was to delete some Trash. Unfortunately I didn’t want to delete everything because you never know when something might come in handy. All I wanted to do was delete certain files.

All you need to do is open the Trash in Finder, open a Terminal window and in Terminal type rm

Then you just drag the items you don’t want into the Terminal window and press enter. That will permanently delete them.

Simples

Silverlight vs Flash

Andy — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 11:28:36 +0000

OK, so this is going to be one of those Microsoft vs everyone else rants but I can’t help it – there’s a reason they keep cropping up.

Many moons ago I visited the Microsoft website for assistance in fixing a problem they’d created and was asked to install Silverlight. Since my job involves keeping up to date with web technologies I installed it and as far as I know haven’t used it since.

It turns out that one website does use it – Sky Player. I use Sky Player when I’m working in the evenings so i work on one Mac and then watch TV or a film on Sky Player using my Laptop.

At the weekend I was working a bit on Friday night and loaded up Firefox to go to Sky Player. Firefox then informed me that a plugin wanted to be run in 32 bit mode – a message I hadn’t seen before but I assumed was due to the recent upgrade to Firefox 5 which must now natively run in 64 bit and some plugins haven’t been updated yet. Since I knew Flash was alright, that’s when I found out it was running Silverlight.

Now here’s my problem with Microsoft and Silverlight. You upgrade Firefox and sometimes it informs you that you need to upgrade Flash too and so you do and then everything just keeps working nicely. Not so with Microsoft. Because everything they do has to have a business / revenue generating reason behind it, they don’t play well with others. That means that Firefox doesn’t inform you that Silverlight needs to be updated.

So, why is this a downside? Well, because in the case of Sky Player, they use a system to authenticate devices so you can only watch stuff through your Sky account on a number of devices and one of those must be authenticated as the main device, so in my case I have accountname-Mac, accountname-Windows and accountname-Xbox with the Mac being the main device. However when I went in at the weekend, it was saying the device I was using wasn’t registered and it would be registered automatically. Except that it was in the registered device list and wouldn’t add itself again or become authenticated so I couldn’t watch anything.

Arrrggghhh, they annoy me.

Removing “My Account” and “Logout” form header in Zen on Drupal

Andy — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 10:26:31 +0000

I’m just developing a new site in Drupal using the Zen STARTERKIT and it’s been a while since I’d done a design without the “My Account” and “Logout” links being needed in the header.

To get rid of them, simply go to admin/structure/menu/settings and change or remove a menu in the Secondary Menus.

Simples