Monday, Mar 9, 2015
An interesting problem we’ve faced recently was that one one of our sites, our FlexNav based mobile menus were being forced to display even on large devices when advanced css aggregation was switched on.
When we switched it off to investigate the problem, it was magically resolved. Turn it back on again, and FlexNav breaks. On some pages of the site, the menus displayed as expected even when aggregation was switched on, though that might have been because those pages were more heavily cached.
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Tuesday, Mar 3, 2015
By default, Flot with the Flot categories plugin doesn’t allow for you to use the ticks or tickSize option to show less ticks when there are too many data points on the x-axis for all of the labels to fit.
Our initial thought was to attempt to achieve this using a Ticks function inside the axis options. Unfortunately, this proved to be impossible due to the fact that the function appeared to run once for every tick on the axis, which would make it unworkable once we added the necessary computation.
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Tuesday, Feb 24, 2015
Recently we’ve been working on updating our clients page, which required us to think, for the first time in a while, “what do people want from a clients page?”.
Our first thought as developers was to start bashing out lengthy case studies documenting the finer points of Drupal Commerce configuration and Apache Solr setups, but then we remembered we weren’t writing them for our benefit and went back to the drawing board.
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Monday, Feb 16, 2015
At Will Hall Online, we’ve recently started using the Geany IDE for Linux, and as there doesn’t seem to have been a great amount written about, it, we thought we’d share some of our first impressions of the program.
First off, it seems to have pretty good support for PHP and Javascript, which forms the bulk of our coding. It’s got some really handy plugins, such as a version control one that allows you to push stuff straight to Git. And it seems to do all of the stuff you would expect from your IDE in terms of indenting, code folding, reminding you of function parameters, with a minimum of fuss.
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Tuesday, Feb 3, 2015
Alongside developing lots of different websites in Drupal, we also maintain and administer a number of different servers. In this role we occasionally end up managing a number of different domain names. It struck us as interesting that many people don’t really understand the difference between using the domain with or without www, for example www.willhallonline.co.uk and willhallonline.co.uk. They are technically two different subdomains of willhallonline.co.uk, however, it has to be stressed that they are different. You can even extend these to be routed to different locations (servers) or websites.
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Monday, Feb 2, 2015
Most Drupal Commerce sites, one would think, are likely to want to send emails to their customers detailing the contents and total cost of their order for confirmation purposes. However, it can be surprisingly difficult to show all of the information required, so I thought I’d write something down to make sure I have something to refer to next time this comes up!
By default, the tokens available to the commerce mail module only show each individual line item and the order total. There is no separate token to show taxes or shipping costs, which is very confusing for the customer.
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Monday, Jan 19, 2015
We ran into this error PHP Warning: Error while sending QUERY packet. PID=25016 the other day when trying to run an update query on a database with approximately 3.8 million records in it. New data had become available for 2.1 million of these records.
These were submitted using a PHP program which fetched and parsed enormous CSV files before using a PDO statement to insert or update the records into MySQL. Upon running the program, the PHP warning would appear.
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Monday, Jan 12, 2015
In 2014, Will Hall Online took on several new members of staff and undertook several of its biggest projects yet. It was an exciting year for the business, but was not without its challenges. One of the most significant of these was an ever-increasing administrative workload resulting from this growth.
To help manage our operations, we’ve adopted a range of technologies which help us to track the amount of time we spend on projects, communicate issues with clients, and maintain our social media presence. They’re now pretty central to what we do, so we thought we’d throw out a few thoughts on some of them to see how our experiences compare with others.
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Tuesday, Jan 6, 2015
All sorts of fun this week at Will Hall Online trying to use the Drupal Commerce Feeds module to import several hundred images on to a site. Initially our thoughts had been to manage file uploads via the IMCE module, but once the data requirements of our client became clear it was apparent that a more efficient solution was needed. Here’s what we did:
Created a new directory on our server to contain these images Moved the images across from their original location inside sites/default, then removed them from the standard file system, including thumbnails. Created an extra column on our product data CSV file containing the new URL for each product’s image. Mapped that column onto the product image field on the site. We then deleted all of the existing product data on the site to give us a fresh start and reimported the data. Products uploaded successfully. Images now present on the site’s filesystem. Less so on the site’s front-end. Those of you familiar with Commerce Feeds and in possession of a close attention to detail might be able to see why already.
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Wednesday, Nov 19, 2014
For a recent project, a client wanted us to create a carousel style display of product images which could be cycled through using a panel of thumbnails immediately underneath, or by back and forward buttons. There are numerous tutorials available online regarding how to create this sort of effect, but few specifically aimed at integrating with the Drupal 7 Views module. So we thought we’d make a few notes of our own on the subject.
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