Drupal Programmer

Recently i had to setup a xml import process to import data from an external supplier on a regular basis, the filename and format was not changing and i could choose where to store the file. Following is how i set it up. First we need to download the following modules feeds feeds admin ui feeds_xpathparser ctools job_scheduler enable the above modules. We will need a sample XML so this will be the one we will use for this demonstration: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <!-- Sample for demonstration of processing XML feeds with feeds module --> <Orders> <Order> <CustomerID>10</CustomerID> <Order_Number>1</Order_Number> <Order_Total>100</Order_Total> <Currency>£</Currency> </Order> <Order> <CustomerID>11</CustomerID> <Order_Number>2</Order_Number> <Order_Total>40</Order_Total> <Currency>$</Currency> ...

Recently one of my acquaintances started his own business. He was on a shoe string budget and did not want to pay for a mysql database. I toyed with using free mysql hosting offering and tried one on amazon cloud (xeround). I was able to make it work but the performance was very bad. With luck i found using phpinfo() that sqllite support was built in and installed the site in under 10mins. Cool ha!

I have built a commerce demo site by using Drupal Commerce and Drupal 7.9, it was a breeze to setup but bit difficult to customise. I have used various types of products types and a single product display to manage all the content and products. The theme is currently 'bartik' which is the default theme that comes with Drupal 7. I enjoyed setting this shop up, i have used views to customise product pages, used taxonomy terms in the department and product pages to improve SEO and display of pages. http://www.grayns.co.uk/online/ Online Demo of an E-commerce site using Drupal commerce.

I downloaded the drush from the drupal website at http://drupal.org/project/drush. I downloaded the 7.x-4.5 version -  I was using mac os x and if you are also using mac os or any other flavour of linux - you should download the tar.gz file.  Drush works best on linux/mac os x - it works on windows as well but has its limitations, although things are improving but you will need to install additional software that allows you to use many drush functions. If you are interested to look at how to install drush on windows then have a look at drush.ws. I did install on my old windows pc as well, got most of it working. Coming back to the topic, we are installing on mac os x - so here goes. The accompanying readme.txt file is quite good in showing what is required, and it really is straight forward. Albeit there are a few differences and may be you would like to customise your installation a little bit - but this is what i did. The first step was to download and extra...

FCKEditor has had its hey days, worked well with drupal as well, but it was bloated and slow. Then came the CKEditor, shiny new and fast gui editor. There is a drupal 6 & 7 module for CKeditor, but the module for drupal 5 is missing. Understandaby, we dont want no one to use drupal 5 any more... however there are still some legacy systems using drupal 5, like the one i am currently working on. upgrading to drupal 6 is not straight forward and requires approvals and budgets from tons of people. The next obvious option is to write a custom quick fix to make drupal 5 work with ckeditor, ckeditor and drupal 5 works out of the box with wyiwyg module but unfortunately only works on drupal defined or cck defined content types, if the content type is defined programatically - it doesnt work with those textareas. Hence a need for a custom module like the ones available for drupal 5 & 6. There may be a work around i am thinking but havent yet got time to get around to trying....

Drush is a feature of Drupal, that really shines. If you have used scripts to automate small administration jobs you will understand how useful this is in your toolkit. Things you can do with drush: 1. Download drupal, download and install modules 2. Enable/Disable and uninstall modules 3. Run cron 4. clear cache and much more. We all know how incredibly helpful drush can be, i am not going to write about this. Rather how to make drush working correctly on windows environment. Drush works best on linux, however a lot of developers use windows machine, and face a little bit of a challenge. Below is the list of things you have to do to make drush work well on windows. I have used the steps below to configure drush on my wamp machine. http://drupal.org/node/594744

When i started with Drupal, it was a stuttering start, I installed drupal on my wamp development machine and voila it just worked. Woo hoo, there was a ready framework with built in login and authentication, and i could create content see it appear on the front page, with a little bit of tinkering i could change theme, download themes from the druapl.org website and all looked swell. After a while i realised, things werent moving much, i was soon struggling with finding a way to remove the login block, once i did that i was struggling with accesing the login page without the login block. took me a little while before i found what requires to be done. it was then that it dawned on me -It was not going to be easy, but boy i was going to enjoy it. This was Drupal 5 and Drupal 6 was just about to come into being, there were not a lot of drupal books, not much on the internet. For drupal starters there has never been a better time. Drupal 7 is here, there are a lot of books available, ...