Tag: development

Drupal – When to Code and when NOT to….

I have found a really great book for those who want to do Drupal development from O’Reilly.Programmer’s Guide to Drupal. This isn’t really a book for those who want to lhaveearn PHP though. It’s for those who are already comfortable with coding and want to apply those skills to Drupal.

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What this book does really well is to show you when to start writing your own code and when not to. It also recommends that a novice Drupal developer learn to build sites in Drupal without any custom coding at all in the beginning. With something like 24,000 modules out there, there is always a good chance that someone has already written code for the very purpose you have. Or that judicious use of core modules will allow you to get where you need to be.

Check this book out: it is AWESOME!

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920027799.do

How to write a working Drupal Module

The power of Drupal can only be leveraged best if you learn how to write your own custom modules. If you know a bit of PHP and aren’t intimidated by functions, elements, arrays and the like, this is the best place to start. Drupal.org Community Docs. This tutorial will take you through the ins and outs of writing a basic but very functional Drupal module. This tutorial will, in great detail, explain all the steps needed to create a module that will allow you to show a configurable number of posts in a block, create a configuration menu option for the module and include a Help page.

I’ve looked at many online tutorials on how to write basic modules and this one is the best. It has the most thorough explanations and is rigorous in its adherence to Drupal commenting standards, coding standards and naming conventions. As well as the Drupal specific functions that make developing for Drupal easier. If you want to learn Drupal PHP development, this is the place to start.

https://drupal.org/node/1074362

Mobile Device Resolution Roundup

This is a good resource for mobile developers looking for a comprehensive list of smartphone devices and their resolutions. The list is pretty exhaustive, including several hundred makes and models. Certainly worthy of a bookmark.

http://cartoonized.net/cellphone-screen-resolution.php

More about theming – Devel Themer

What I really want to do is to be able to do whatever I want. Haha. Seriously, I want to be able to customize Drupal so that it doesn’t look like Drupal. So I am now working on theming functions. And to find out how a particular part of my site is generated, I am using the Devel module along with Devel Themer. These used to be packaged together but now they are separate contrib modules.

I had a sort of hard time getting Devel_themer to work properly. It was on the harder side of medium as far as modules go. But, I paid close attention to the issue queue at Drupal.org for the Devel_themer module and I was able to get it all figured out eventually. If you are getting 404 AJAZ errors, look at the queue and you will find answers there.

Lullabot has some good videos on how to use Devel_Themer. Check them out here.

Customizing my Drupal theme – Adaptive Themes Core

well, it is time that i started customizing my theme. i knew that i would want to do this myself so i put some thought into my theme choice before I started. and I decided to with adaptive themes core.

AT Core 7.x-3.1

AT Core is the framework that drives the responsive layout system and provides an extensive set of tools for theme development. You do not need to enable this theme. Use the provided AT Subtheme to get started.
this theme is pretty basic to begin with. and while it isn’t hard at all to create your own subtheme (and you should do it just to get a good understanding of drupal theme architecture) it is nice that AT comes with one ready to be destroyed. note – if you plan on modifying a theme, make a subtheme out of it first. that way it can still take advantage of upgrades via drupal.org. I also chose it because it is a responsive theme, meaning that it does media queries to determine screen width. This is important for mobile devices and tablets. AT also has good documentation and support. I’ll post links to this post as I find them.
AT on Drupal.org – the main page
AT Documentation – Very good stuff here, and professional service options too.
I have my sandbox in pretty good shape. and it is using the same theme and subtheme. So, I will be doing my development there and then transferring the files to prod. Make sure that you disable any caching that you might have enabled so that you get fresh versions of changes as they are made.

Good book for PHP, MySQL and Apache

I have been working with this particular book now for a couple of months now and I have to say that it is one of my favorites.

Sam’s Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache. – this link goes to Amazon.Image

This book is perfect for where I want to go with Drupal. xAMP is the Drupal backbone and this book covers everything that I need from the last three letters of this acronym. There code sample are well documented and helpful. Check it out if you plan to be able to develop for Drupal and not just implement the modules and themes that are on Drupal.org.

Live Site – DOCResource.org

Well, I think that my site is finally ready for some sort of publication. It doesn’t have all the functionality that I want and it has almost no styling at all. But that’s fine; it is a work in progress. And as I add CSS and theme elements, I’ll post how I achieved the results.

If you care to take a look I invite you to. And let me know what you think. DOCResource.org is the name of the site.

I’ve been involved in prison ministry for some time now and got the idea for the site from my experience in dealing with men involved in the criminal justice system and Departments of Correction (DOC) of various states in the USA. The situations that these men and women find themselves in are exceedingly difficult and their families are often ill equipped to deal with the complicated proceedings of the American justice system.  There are few free resources out there and information is usually gained through word of mouth or overtaxed public defenders. So there is usually precious little on which to make informed decisions. I hope to help address that.

The site is listed as a .org and I do plan on incorporating as a 501(c)(3) if the site proves to fill a need and attract an audience. I have a couple of guys providing a bit of feeder information in the blogs and forums and I want to thank them for helping me out. My desire to help springs from my faith and I pray that others may see that and find a desire in themselves to help those in need.

PHP Programming Frameworks

PHP Programming Frameworks

Make your PHP projects simpler with a development framework.

It is difficult to leverage Drupal to its full extent without actually learning the mechanics behind it – PHP. Since Drupal is a framework for Content Management, I decided to see if there might be a similar type of framework for PHP, the soul of Drupal. I discovered this great roundup on Wikipedia on development frameworks for many different programming languages. And here I discovered Yii. You can see from both sites that the Yii (Yes It Is) MVC (Model, View, Controller) framework scores better than the others, offering more features. And it is under the BSD license so the download is free!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_frameworks

http://www.phpframeworks.com/ – This is another good resource, specifically for PHP.

So with the choice for Yii made, I decided to look for a book on the subject. I’ve had good luck with Packtpub before so I decided to check their web site to see if they offer anything on Yii. And lo and behold, they do.

I’ve been reading the book, working with the sample code and using Yii for a few weeks now and the book has been really helpful. The chapters navigate the development path of a real application. The book touches on every aspect that a real world development team will face in software production from user access control, issue management to production readiness. It also explores the Blueprint CSS framework, which allows the team to make the application look polished and refined.

The code examples are easy to use and well documented, allowing for a great learning experience even for a novice.

All in all, a great resource for those in software development for the web. Highly recommended.

error with conflicting modules

Well, I’ve had a fun time here in the last day and a half trying to get a resolution for the error in advanced forum module. I received good support from drupal.org but the error wasn’t really with the AF at all. It was something with the panels everywhere module. I’ve reproduced it several times and there really is no doubt.

it’s disappointing, i really wanted to be able to use the panels everywhere module. But i also need to have as many options with the forum as I can get. so, panels everywhere will have to go.

glad that I made sure to have a good back up of things so I could do some comparisons. always have a backup.