Monday, Jul 11, 2016
If you have been following the growth of encryption on the web (https) and the fact that you can now get free SSL certificates (much like the one on this site) using Lets Encrypt, there is very little reason for not having your site running https, making your data encrypted between the server and the user, making everyone more secure.
If you are doing this in Apache, then most open-source projects will suggest the you use the rewrite engine inside apache. Something like this:
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Friday, Jul 1, 2016
Version control. A saviour of modern development and with everyone using git to manage their code nowadays (at least for the last 5 years) having an understanding of git is an essential part of being a developer. Recently I have become more and more involved in code review, using GitLab, Bitbucket and GitHub to manage code from different developers for different projects. This is made easier by using a workable workflow (something like GitFlow), however, as I am involved in more and more projects of endless dread when I start with project and it has unnecessary, large or sensitive files that have been committed into its history.
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Thursday, Dec 24, 2015
At Will Hall Online we always try to commit some time to developing open source projects. As I am sure that you are aware, we have been using Drupal since 2008 and absolutely love both the software and the community, however, much of our time is already committed and we do more in deed than in code to contribute to the community (providing assistance, presentations and helping the local Drupal group). However, in some recent downtime, I had a chance to get more involved in module maintainership for the Sheetnode module, which is a great way to use and create spreadsheets on Drupal.
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Tuesday, Dec 15, 2015
Performance is important in all aspects of life, and none more than business.
Oxford Dictionaries define performance as “A task or operation seen in terms of how successfully it is performed”
and this should be applied to every aspect of your business, including your website.
When it comes to performance metrics there are some key statistics you should be measuring on your website including page load speed, page size and number of requests. This is where size truly does matter.
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Friday, Nov 27, 2015
A quick note this week on a potentially useful contrib module that’s got me out of a jam. I’ve been trying to find a way to populate a select box on a Drupal webform with a list of node titles. Basically what I wanted was something like an entity reference field for webforms.
One approach to get round this is to use the entity form module, which basically allows you to use entity edit forms in the front end. It’s nice, but it’s a lot of work when you’re working on a perfectly good webform that’s already in existence. Webform also has the advantage of things such as easy to use placeholders and, especially, conditionals. I could also have used the webform view module, but that seems a bit buggy with webform 4.x to me.
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Friday, Nov 20, 2015
After over four years of hard work, the Drupal community was proud to announce the release of the first stable version of Drupal 8 at over two hundred release parties around the world. It’s a really exciting time for everyone involved with the project, and followers of our blog will know how much we love the new features. We had a great time at the London release party last night (19th November 2015) meeting Drupal users old and new.
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Thursday, Nov 19, 2015
We all know that Drupal Commerce is really flexible. If you want variable pricing dependant upon location, csutomer type or basket size, no problem. However, some areas of Drupal Commerce do require not only relatively specialist knowledge, but also coding to give the required outcome. We recently had an interesting problem through Cambridge Digital Academy, wherein they were looking at displaying discounts at the checkout form. By default the order of display is:
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Tuesday, Nov 17, 2015
Last evening I presented “WordPress: Up and Running” at the Cambridge WordPress Meetup group. Apart from being a very enjoyable evening, it is always interesting to get involved with new communities and see how people are using technology and building web applications.
As we (at Cambridge Digital Academy) have been running training recently, I volunteered to run a quick presentation on how to get Up and Running with WordPress which basically discussed through how to start making websites/blogs with WordPress. I have embedded the slides from the presentation on this post.
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Friday, Nov 13, 2015
This week I’ve been playing about with a neat tool by Dave Reid, called Drush Patch File, for tracking and applying patches to contrib modules on Drupal projects. We’ve found ourselves patching a few modules recently on several projects, including the Drupal 7 backport of Navbar so that the drop-downs work better on desktop.
The problem faced when patching contributed modules is that, if the module is updated but the patch isn’t included in the new release, then the module is effectively un-patched. Bad news. Therefore, we have to reapply the patch manually.
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Friday, Oct 30, 2015
We confidently believe that Drupal 8 is going to be great for users out of the box. There are a number of significant user experience and user interface elements that are in Drupal core that are going to make substantial improvements to new and existing users alongside Drupal 8 being even quicker out of the box. In this post I am going to focus on the user or content editor experience and focus on more developer focussed parts in a subsequent blog post.
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