When I was younger I wanted to join a football team. I had visions of scoring the winning goal and being the hero. Unfortunately I turned up with a pair of goalkeeper gloves, one of the others on the team decided I must be a goalkeeper then. And that’s the position I played for many years, and I loved it. Now I’ve been a backend developer for many many yeas and I love that as well. ...
When I started working for Headscape I also started working from home. Our office is a 3 hour drive form where I live so commuting isn’t an option and as a family we were not looking to relocate. In the past few years I’ve learnt a lot from home working and how to make it work for me and our team. Here are some tips that I have found smooth the process. ...
I was recently asked by a client to produce a report of content posted by day. My first instinct was to query the database for all rows of the particular content type and handle the counting in PHP. First Idea # Query the database for all rows of content type X Create an array in PHP of days Loop through all rows Use PHP to figure out the day the row was created Increment the array element for that day This seemed pretty inefficient though and felt like something some SQL could handle far better. ...
The web is constantly developing and growing at a fast pace. I often wonder how beginners even know where to start and marvel at their ability to not be daunted by the myriad of options available to today’s developers. I started my web developing career when there was a clear distinction between HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I remember using table based layout but quickly processed to floats for layout and some simple JavaScript for things like rollovers. ...
The installation of a minimal Drupal setup is very quick and easy. From there I enabled a few modules and a theme to help me create some data. Modules enabled Field UI Image Views View UI RESTful Web Services I also installed the Devel module to help with dummy content population of my content type Article. A common function of a website is to list content in an order, newest items or most relevant, and paginate this list. ...
Recently at Headscape we were setting up a new server ready to launch a redesign of a site. Whilst testing we were accessing the site using the server’s IP address which works fine for checking everything is working, apart from when we needed to install the SSL certificate. The SSL certificate is based on a domain name so going to an IP address causes the SSL certificate to warn of an insecure connection. ...
At Headscape we use TeamCity as our Continuous Integration server and I recently came across an error when trying to build Drupal Commerce Kickstart. The main parts of the error message were Failed to build patch for build... due to error: 'build patch' command failed. stderr: The repository has a submodule in the commit '77b28273d1ebb08fd03ee254bbb20b6b476d16ec' at a path 'profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/jquery.bxslider', but has no .gitmodules configuration at the root directory To fix this I needed a list of the submodules which I found using a command given in this Stack Overflow thread ...
I’ve been using Codeception for some acceptance testing recently. The project has a large database and using the standard Codeception database module that rebuilds the entire DB from an SQL dump was too slow. All I needed to do was run a few queries to put some tables into a known state. I made a helper module that will run all .sql files in a directory. I’ve put the DbHelper on Github and hopefully it will be useful for others. ...
At Headscape we were recently contacted by Brian Lewis from Modules Unraveled Podcast to see if we would like to appear on the show to discuss our use of Drupal. It was really great to have a chat with Brian and there were a few questions sent in by Twitter users who were watching the live stream. You can listen to episode 90 on the Modules Unraveled website.
I have been working for The Marine Biological Association for close to five years now but the time has come to move on. I’m very proud to say I will be working for Headscape where I’m sure I will learn lots and continue to progress as a developer. In the five years since I started the web and my skills have progressed exponentially. It’s been fun and nostalgic to talk about the early days and see how far the sites and applications have come since I began working with the MBA. ...