It's a good question. Drupal, and other open-source software is free, so why should you pay for consultancy and development. Surely you can just download the software and setup your own site. Well, not quite... ... Continue Reading

On a recent project we have a page (generated by Views) that has 3 panels with a listing, calendar and map. The map and calendar contains entries for all of the items on the list. However, the number items in the list requires pagination. On the detail page for each entry you can simply use the browser back button to return to the previous page, but you get a warning asking if you're sure you want to resubmit the form, ... Continue Reading

I've now started to use drush almost exlusively to manage our Drupal instances. If you're not familiar with drush it provides an excellent command line interface to Drupal. One of the most powerful features in drush is site aliases. This allows you to setup shortcuts to your dev, staging and live servers. Once you've setup the aliases (see below), you can simply reference any of you servers with the @alias. ... Continue Reading

We are just about to add have recently added location-based services to the BeGrand.net website and will be offering a way to search for events close to your post code. As part of the build we're using the excellent Location module which provides a proximity search by default. The latest version at time of writing is 6.x-3.1. We have an exposed block that provides the basic search form and this leads to a Google map displaying events nearby - so you can search ... Continue Reading

I regularly import the Drupal database from our hourly backups into our local development server for testing purposes. That's all well and good, but I really wanted a way to remove any genuine registered user data from the database so that I keep things nice and anonymous. ... Continue Reading

I recently needed to check that visitors to a certain node had been referred from a particular page in order to enter a draw. This is my quick and dirty hack to get the working nicely... ... Continue Reading

It's official. My search for the perfect to-do solution is over. I recently got a MacBook Pro as my primary weapon of choice from my employers and that has allowed me to do what I know is right and use the amazingly simple, but incredibly effective, Things from Cultured Code. It's the closest I've ever come to perfection in terms of UI. It works on all of the platforms I need (including iPhone for meetings - used it this morning!). ... Continue Reading

The more I develop the more I hate bloatware. Let me explain... I code using Coda, because it does what I need. I looked at Aptana Studio, Eclipse, PHPIDE and lots of others, before settling on Coda. I signed up for MacHeist last year and got at license for Espresso, but still didn't use it. Coda rocks. It is a fantastic editor. It may not do code folding - a favourite of mine, coming in Coda 2 apparently - but it ... Continue Reading

As I've previously mentioned, we're developing BeGrand.net using an iterative, agile methodology, which is nice. However, this is the most misunderstood element of my working life when I talk to other, non-techies about it. So I thought I'd write this post to describe what an iteration, in the terms of BeGrand.net, actually means... We've just pulled down the wooly hat, given a lovely packed lunch to and generally kissed off to the first day of school our first proper release since ... Continue Reading

We've recently moved our servers to a new build on the Amazon EC2 cloud infrastructure which has been an interesting process (more posts coming once we've launched the site and have a nice cuppa!) We're also big biG bIG BIG fans of Panic's excellent file transfer client (Transmit) and amazing editor (Coda) both of which are Mac-only. However, being used to a keypair from the servers to manage ssh login and sftp transfers, I couldn't work out how to connect using ... Continue Reading