“What we learn from lessons learned is that we don’t learn from lessons learned.” – T. Block So you are about to kickoff a project. You have a budget, a deadline, and a deliverable: an awesome website launch. As you already know, there are 3 criteria by which you’ll measure your project’s success: on time, …
Read more »Topic: Development
The dreaded “MySQL has gone away” error
In environments where there are many databases running on the same machine (ex. shared hosting), or in high traffic environments (ex. enterprise sites) it is a common problem that unterminated connections to the database linger around indefinitely until MySQL starts spitting out the “Too many connections” error. The fix for this is decrease the wait_timeout …
Read more »A lesson in the usefulness of CSS sprite generators
The basic premise of a sprite image is to consolidate your site’s graphics into one (or more) master image file. Then, with the magic of CSS’s background-position property, you can shift the master sprite image around and only reveal the parts you want. Like a window. Some might even say like a Sliding Door. What …
Read more »Theming the User Login Block
Don’t want people to look at your site and immediately know it is Drupal? Theme your user login block! While it isn’t always your top priority, customizing the look and feel of the login form helps maintain the integrity of a custom design. In this post, I’ll get you started using both CSS and PHP …
Read more »Quick and easy Congressional District lookups for your CiviCRM contacts
By definition CiviCRM is used by many organizations in the political sphere. For those organizations working in the US one useful metric to have on your contacts is their congressional district. Up until now this has usually been accomplished with either custom code, or exporting your contacts, sending them through a bulk lookup tool, and …
Read more »Media Sprint in NYC a Success!
On October 23-24, Jonathan and I met with some of the top Drupal Media developers in NYC for a code sprint. The purpose of the sprint was to bring to fruition the vision of the Media module for Drupal 7, which will act as a unified media file browser for the Internet, allowing editors to …
Read more »Drupal Maintainability III – Self Documentation
It’s been a while since I’ve done an article in the Maintainability series, but that’s how the web business goes – alternating between insane activity and manageable momentum. This time we’re talking about writing self-documenting code. For those of you who write code, be it theming, CSS, module development, or anything else I think self-documenting …
Read more »TckTckTck
TckTckTck is a GCCA campaign calling for a new fair, strong, binding, and international climate change treaty. The Global Campaign for Climate Action recently formed to build a global groundswell for a strong climate deal in Copenhagen this December. GCCA is a collaboration of International NGOs inspired by the success of the Make Poverty History …
Read more »Stream Wrappers and You
This past weekend, a team of core Drupal developers, including Peter Wolanin (pwolanin), Andrew Morton (drewish), Jon Stacey (jmstacey), Justin Randell (justinrandell), Jody Hamilton (Jody Lynn), Alex UA (Alex UA), and myself, met at the Zivtech headquarters in Philly to hammer out some hot media and file functionality. After much arm-wrestling, teeth-gnashing, and nail-biting, plus …
Read more »10 Tips for Theming Drupal 6 Forms
In the last month, I’ve been working on a project that requires a very custom look and feel for login/register/adding content forms, and worked what I’ve learned into a presentation. Now I’ve got a little running list of tips for whipping Drupal forms into shape. Check out the Stealther plugin. If you are theming a …
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