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. ...
To achieve this you will need to implement hook_views_query_alter() in a custom module. I did not do this in Views UI. A recent project at Headscape required me to build view listing two different content types that would use two different date fields to sort by. For examples I’ll use the default basic page and article content types. The Problem # Some content types need to be sorted on the node created date and others on the display date field. ...
I’ve been using ReactJS as I have been exploring Headless / Decoupled Drupal and have so far found it to be very nice to work with. However, as I am not overly familar with it I’ve found myself looking up lots of things to ensure I’m doing it “the React way”. This has meant I’ve been doing more React learning than I have Drupal learning. My solution is to go back to an existing Drupal 7 project where I have a custom piece of search functionality and replicate it using JSON feeds provided by Drupal and a ReactJS frontend. ...
I’ve been lucky enough to attend DrupalCon Dublin and DrupalCon Vienna, at both of these events there has been a lot of talk about Headless / Decoupled Drupal and in particular using a JavaScript framework as a frontend for your site. Since then Dries has followed up with a blog post confirming that there will be attempts to include the React Framework in core. Inspird by this I decided to start trying out Headless / Decouple Drupal. ...
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 ...
This post also appears on the Headscape site as part of our blog. During my teens and twenties I spent a lot of time skateboarding. It’s quite a unique sport in the way it influences your life as a whole. For example, you begin to look at architecture in a new creative way. You also fall over, a lot. In fact you get really good at falling over: jump down ten steps roll across the concrete, hop up and do it again. ...