Drupal Programmer

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!

  One of the must have books i have every read on Drupal 7, the collection of authors have done a marvellous job. The usual price from amazon.co.uk is around £28 but using the above link you can get it for £19 a saving of around £10. There are many a book reviews about this book so i am not going to get into this, i have just started reading the book. One thing the book with the link i have provided is a warehouse clearance deal, which means the  book is not hot of the press. but i bought from the warehouse deals myself, and i could not see any difference. Advised to check details on the items before you buy.

Google webfonts is a really nice and easy way to spice up your website, gone are the days of fiddling with never failsafe attempts with the likes of cufon, this is really nice and easy. And a good thing like always there is a drupal module for it. Just download the @font-your-face module and configure, you can choose which fonts you can enable and choose which font to apply to what kind of html tags, you can choose a separate font for h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 and separate fonts for all text, but not the best of interface, but does the job. The hardest thing was after installation trying to find where to do the settings, quick look at the documentation and it was found that just go to appearance and it adds a tab for font-your-face. I really like this and have tried this on my drupal commerce demo site.. http://www.grayns.co.uk/online/ I have used the  Open Sans 700italic (cyrillic) for headers and  Amaranth 400italic (latin) for everything else...was easy breezy.

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 found it interesting to see how to integrate NoSQL, but more interesting was to unlearn somethings i learnt through years of training - denormalise! Normalisation was the term that made rdbms, good normalisation design was supposed to be a hallmark of a good database designer. But NoSQL is different, forget joins forget collecting data from 10 different tables NoSQL is radically different and the best part is it works for very large datasets, is distributed, and some very big installations like twitter, amazon and others mean if you don't look at this seriously soon you will be in trouble. Drupal by itself doesn't support NoSQL out of the box and you don't throw away mysql yet, there is a module (cassandra) that was recently added on drupal.org which is worth checking, One possible way of integrating with drupal is using a nosql may be casandra or mongodb with your entities, infact this is one of the best things of entities, your fields can live in a separate database ...

Like everyone in the UK i woke up to the news of tragic death of Steve Jobs the Apple co-founder, i was not going to write a blog post on the topic, but there was something that prompted me to write one. I got the news not from my tv but my macbook pro! I switched on my macbook, fired up a new tab in safari, and there it was, very simple, very sober 'Steve Jobs' 1955-2011. A real tribute to the design genius he was. I am sure there will be a new person at the helm of things at Apple, Apple may continue to grow in leaps and bounds or may just fizzle out - but you can't take that away from Steve, the way he came back to Apple when things weren't going very well - brought the iMac which was a run away success, followed up with other fantastic products we all love and cherish. The most important thing was he got Apple to believe they were not in the business to shift boxes but deliver what the customer expects, stuff that just works. Hats off and tributes to the g...