Auto Tweeting Links to Pre-Existing Content in Drupal 7

Auto Tweeting Links to Pre-Existing Content in Drupal 7

Friday, May 15, 2015
This week at Will Hall Online we’ve been building a system on one of our sites which periodically tweets a link to an existing piece of content, along with some custom text, a description and hashtags. Possible solutions included: Writing a custom module Try to use the contributed twitter_queue module Construct something using the standard Twitter contrib module, views and rules. We went for the third option in the end, firstly because the working of the twitter_queue module were somewhat mysterious, and secondly because writing a custom module seemed like unnecessary extra effort when we could just use the enormously powerful views and rules modules to come up with something robust and flexible. ...

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Ansible Talk at Drupal Cambs

Ansible Talk at Drupal Cambs

Friday, May 1, 2015
This Monday I had the privilege of giving my first talk at the Drupal Cambrdige meetup (@drupalcambs). It was on the subject of using Ansible to provision servers and manage Drupal installations and the slides are embedded below. I had a lot of fun giving the presentation and hopefully it will be the first of many. I just hope the audience had as much of a good time! Just a few accompanying notes for the slides (I didn’t want to overdo it with onscreen text for the presentation, so a lot of it is mainly headlines): ...

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Drupal 7 AdvAgg Module Issue with FlexNav Mobile Menu

Drupal 7 AdvAgg Module Issue with FlexNav Mobile Menu

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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Drupal Commerce Mail Tokens

Drupal Commerce Mail Tokens

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. ...

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Feeds Import With Images

Feeds Import With Images

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. ...

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Creating a Flexslider Carousel with Image Thumbnail Navigation

Creating a Flexslider Carousel with Image Thumbnail Navigation

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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Attempting to stop Spam and Bots on Drupal 7

Attempting to stop Spam and Bots on Drupal 7

Tuesday, Jul 30, 2013
As I am sure most of you are aware, spam, in the case of unsolicited advertising or off-topic posting as opposed to the processed meat, and bots, the ones that remotely attempt to do stuff on your site, are two of the largest problems for any website that allows comments, signups, creation of content or such like. I have recently been looking into ways to prevent spam and bot-based site registrations in Drupal 7, as on several sites we were experiencing that Captcha’s were simply not preventing enough. ...

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Starting the Drupal Serial module from a certain number

Starting the Drupal Serial module from a certain number

Friday, Mar 15, 2013
Recently I have been building a ticketing system in Drupal, which allows logged in users to create support tickets and administrators to comment on them, change them between statuses and close them. All this is mainly done by controlling a content type, called tickets, which only administrators and the creators can see alongside enabling comments and firing a few Rules off to control notifying people of changes and changing between statuses. ...

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UK & Ireland DrupalCamps 2012

UK & Ireland DrupalCamps 2012

Sunday, Jan 27, 2013
I thought that a retrospective at DrupalCamps (not sure whether those words should be joined or not?) over 2012 would be an interesting thing to look at. Both to see the enthusiasm and passion that is behind the Drupal community in the UK & Ireland but also to contrast with other development and tech conferences. My initial inspiration was receiving a mailshot from an unnamed conference offering conference tickets at the early bird price of £999. ...

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Drupal Commerce Display Products in a View

Drupal Commerce Display Products in a View

Monday, Oct 1, 2012
Recently I have been working with Drupal Commerce quite a bit, however, it can be difficult to get your views to display as required, especially as there is no way to specifically select the product entity inside views. So here are a few tips for getting your products to display in useful views. Drupal Commerce product reference relationships OK, so you want to display the products referenced (images prices etc) rather than the node that is linked to them. ...

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