8 May 2013
Here’s a quick tutorial on how to import data into a Drupal installation using a secondary database. I’ve done this by using an external PHP file located at the root of the Drupal installation and bootstrapping it. You can call it import.php.All the magic happens by using db_set_active(‘secondary_database’), which connects Drupal to another database. Calling db_set_active() will switch you back to the default one. This can be configured in our settings.php file.Let’s start with our settings...
19 Apr 2013
If the term Information Architecture (IA) makes your head spin, you’re not alone. While IA often generates confused looks on clients’ faces, it is actually part of our everyday lives and has been since the days of clay tablets and scrolls. To put it into a relatable context, imagine reading a book with no paragraphs, no chapters… just one long block of text. Sounds horrible, right? That’s what happens when IA is not incorporated into a website, creating gaps in user experience.You’ve seen the “...
19 Feb 2013
I still have an old school tube television in my living room, but I couldn’t live without my Internet. I have a PC at my desk, a laptop in my office, an iPad in my purse and a smartphone in my pocket. At any given time, I will find the answer to any question conversation poses via the device closest at hand. I can’t be all that different from any other information consumer! I want great online experiences, every time!I can confirm the likes of “Mashable” and “...
19 Feb 2013
Every website acts as a directory listing for a company and its products and services. However, there are many ways to leverage a website to streamline other aspects of a company's sales and marketing, and even its customer service and operations. Understanding what is possible with a website is key to building the right strategy from the start to ensure your website achieves your business goals.AwarenessMost websites accomplish this basic function. The website describes the company and its...
7 Feb 2013
In the all-things-digital industry there's almost a cult like devotion to the concept of startup. Like many romantic notions, the startup reality rarely resemblances the myth. Sure there are the Instagram stories to entrench that myth with exits of insane multiples. Given an attainable objective of reasonable business growth or powerful internal change the common thread in achieving scale is a highly performing team. Effective team building is often assumed and rarely discussed by those focused...
26 Oct 2012
If you want to provide instant query suggestions to users as they type in text fields, Google’s Autocomplete suggestions—also known as search suggest, autosuggest, or incremental search—grants your applications this power. This article outlines my experience implementing Google’s unofficial Autocomplete API with the EBSCO Discovery Service search feature in Grant MacEwan University Library’s iPhone app (available free in the iTunes App Store).Autocomplete API IntroductionIntroduced in September...
24 Mar 2012
Nginx has clearly established itself as a contender for the dominant next generation web server. However, the road to victory will require some significant improvements to the migration path from Apache and IIS. Online forums and the blogosphere are quickly filling with details on Nginx configuration snippets that share very focused instructions on accomplishing a very specific task. Many of these articles are now wildly out of date as the cycle of Nginx version release accelerates.My objective...
15 Mar 2012
NGINX 1.0.14 was released on 15 March 2012 for both Windows and Linux. The binary is now available in the NGINX repository and direct download from Nginx.com. This stable release corrects a bug that enabled a malformed response from an upstream server to return the contents of previously freed memory to a client.Download link: http://nginx.org/en/download.htmlHybrid Forge runs Nginx on Centos and Red Hat. When starting out we recommend manually adding the NGINX repo to the list of yum...
5 Jul 2011
OK, this one is a bit of an edge case, but I’ve dealt with similar issues while trying to set a static block through a template file when you need that static block to change based on the product being viewed.Sure, it’s easy to call the static block in the product’s custom layout update, but the problem there is that you can’t place that block anywhere between the title and product description. All of those elements are called as childHtml and can’t be referenced by the layout XML. What happens...