Lacisoft's

Job posting: Arxia is looking for PHP developers

lacisoft — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:31:40 +0000

Arxia, the company i work for is looking for good PHP developers. We do TYPO3 and Drupal outsourcing but we also have some other PHP projects that require more resources.

So:

Do you have experience with PHP and MySQL ?
You are comfortable with working on other people’s code ?
You are willing to learn new things ?
You are a good team player ?
You are open to working with Content Management Systems like TYPO3 or Drupal ?
You live in Cluj Napoca, Romania or near the city?

If you can answer with yes to all these questions then please send your resume to: cariere {at} arxiagroup {dot} com

Arxia is an expanding company, with over 8 years of experience in developing web projects for domestic and international clients.

Arxia is great company to work for, that’s because you have a good salary package, flexible work hours and a great deal of freedom in what you do. You don’t have bosses to bug you all the time and the colleagues are great.

Our office is located close to Cluj Napoca center and if you use public transportation than the bus stop is at a 150 meters.

Google upgrades paid storage plans

lacisoft — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:23:51 +0000

I have a paid storage plan at Google which until now featured 10 GB extra storage for 20$ a year. I use it mostly for private (protected) Picasa Photos but its nice to know that my Gmail account has an overflow capacity too.

Google announced today that they will upgrade the paid storage plans because in time the cost of hard drive storage has continued to drop. So my 10 GB’s have been transformed to 80 GB of online storage. That’s for only 20$ a year. Isn’t that cool ? For now i only use like half a gigabyte but i will start uploading tons of photos. Its very convenient to have all the photos online because its less likely to loose them and you can view them them from any computer wherever you are.

And if we speak about this storage upgrade, i must say i think that Google prepares for the much anticipated GDrive with this move. Its only a matter of time before the storage space will be implemented on all Google services, including the ones that have a potential for this service, like Google Docs. So most people will need to sign-up for a storage plan if they intend to store large amount of data at Google.

New storage plans:

My Picasa storage:

My Gmail storage:

Additional columns in TYPO3’s Web-Page Module

lacisoft — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:56:46 +0000

Sometimes the available columns in TYPO3’s web-page module seem to be insufficent. You have Left, Right, Normal and Border.

But what if you want more?

Maybe you have four columns Left, Normal, Central and Right. And besides that you also have Header, Footer and Border.

Its possible. In TYPO3 you can alter these columns to suit your needs. All you need to do is to place a configuration array in the typo3conf/extTables.php

Here is my array:

$TCA["tt_content"]["columns"]["colPos"]["config"]["items"] = array (
"3" => array ("Header||Header||||||||","3"),
"2" => array ("Right||Right||||||||","2"),
"1" => array ("Left||Left||||||||","1"),
"0" => array ("Normal||Normal||||||||","0"),
"5" => array ("Central||Central||||||||","5"),
"6" => array ("Border||Border||||||||","6"),
"4" => array ("Footer||Footer||||||||","4")
);

Also in your Page’s TSconfig you must set the following value

mod.SHARED.colPos_list=0,1,2,3,4,5,6

Theoretically its possible to add as many columns as you need but practically you are limited to 127 because of the database structure for colPos field = tinyint(3) that gives a max value of 127

Back from DrupalCamp Prague

lacisoft — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:00:12 +0000

Last night we’ve returned from DrupalCamp Prague, a two day event with a lots of interesting presentations about Drupal and related technologies. The schedule had some interesting presentations and i attended to almost all of those. The ones i liked most were Search is sexy by Robert Douglass and Using Features by Andrew Burcin. Also an interesting session was the case study held by Jakub Suchy, Using Drupal for your bussines.

But these DrupalCamps are not only about the sessions, socializing is also an important thing and we did exactly that, lots of beers were consumed while talking about Drupal and other topics. I must say that the first social event was held at the U Medvidku restaurant, where the strongest beer in the world is brewed and obviously we tried this beer. Its good, very good.

Bye the way. Prague is a very very beautiful city and has a unique atmosphere and charm. I intend to return here for a more thorough visit. But until then i will have a few nice pictures and lots of memories from there.

Romania was represented at DrupalCamp Prague by eight drupalers: Alina Fleser (alinafleser), Maria Mihaela Cîmpean, Diana Precup (dianaprecup), Andreea Ungureanu, Igor Ştirbu (igor.stirbu), Gabriel Ungureanu (gabrielu), Claudiu Cristea (claudiu.cristea) and myself (Bodor László (lacisoft)).

The most important thing is that while talking about Drupal and Romania we reached to the conclusion that we should organize a DrupalCamp next year in Romania to further promote Drupal and to involve more people in the Drupal community. We started the planning but have nothing to announce at this time. But i can say that if everything goes fine next year there will be a DrupalCamp in Romania!

Leaving for DrupalCamp Prague

lacisoft — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:37:56 +0000

I’m going to DrupalCamp Prague tomorrow. I’m going there to learn new things and meet new people from the Drupal world.

I’ve only started working with Drupal a year and a few months ago. Meantime i learned to use it, to extend it and i started to like it. Initially i hated it because i was used to hard things and always tried to do things the hard way and couldn’t even think that there is a simple solution to a problem. Like installing a module from Drupal.org. Meantime i learned that Drupal can be very simple, but very powerful

Also Drupal has gained a lot of adoption lately. At least from what i see, more and more people adopt Drupal. This is partly because Drupal is easy and has lots of modules. Modules for almost everything. A basic site in Drupal can be set up in a few minutes and customized in a few hours or less.

I’ve read on Dries Buytaert’s blog that even the White House started using Drupal for whitehouse.gov. This is a great proof that open source software can be as good as proprietary or even better. And major companies must not fear adopting and using open source software and open technologies. If the White House can use it then i guess everyone can.

I hope that while in Prague i will learn more about Drupal. I’m curious for example what novelties does Drupal 7 brings us. Also security matters and scaling of Drupal for large sites are subjects of interests for me. And the schedule promises to deliver these things.

And if i’m in Prague i will also visit this wonderful city. I’ve heard many good things about Prague and i will certainly invest a few hours daily into visiting the city. If you know some good places to eat or drink, or you have some recommendations then post them in a comment.

And if you’re in Prague too for DrupalCamp drop me an email to laci [at] lacisoft [dot] ro and we can go out drink a beer or something.

Older powermail versions and config.absRefPrefix

lacisoft — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:55:35 +0000

After having some problems with MSIE i activated on one of my sites the config.absRefPrefix directive and set a prefix to all of my URL. I knew that this might cause some problems, especially with RealURL.

But after some testing i found out that RealURL is working as expected but Powermail forms doesn’t. They submit the form to a wrong URL. After some digging i found the solution. It seems that older versions of Powermail (mine was 1.4.7) doesn’t handle correctly the config.absRefPrefix setting.

So i upgraded to the latest version and this solved my problem. Maybe it will help some of you too.

I have some Google Wave invitations

lacisoft — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:52:48 +0000

I’m testing Google’s new revolutionary product Google Wave wich is in closed preview and i have 2 invitations left. If you want an invitation drop me an email at laci[at]lacisoft[dot]ro

Update: I have sent them out, so for the moment i have no invitations left. I will post an update here if i have more.

Typo3 meeting Cluj Napoca

lacisoft — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:23:42 +0000

Yesterday, 6 october 2009 took place the first TYPO3 meeting in our city, Cluj Napoca, event organized by Typo3Romania. This event was intended to be a start for a whole series of meetings, presentations about TYPO3. The main goal of the meetings and presentations is the popularize TYPO3 among web developers and clients and to share know how and ideas.

The first Typo3 event in Cluj Napoca was a success despite the fact that the participants had different backgrounds, some were developers who use TYPO3 for more then 5 years, some newbies and people who never heard about TYPO3 before and didn’t used it. After getting to know each other the meeting continued with free discussions about TYPO3 and other related technologies. We agreed that the these gatherings should continue and everyone can propose presentation subjects for the next meetings on our Typo3 forum or through email.

I think this was a good start and certainly i have already a few ideas for presentations i would be able to do myself or ones that i would like to see held by other fellow developers. When my presentations will be ready i will let you all know here about the time and place of the next meeting.

Until then here is a nice group picture from the meeting:

How to add a Cancel button to Drupal forms

lacisoft — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:23:54 +0000

Sometimes we need to add a Cancel button to some of the forms we are working with in Drupal. Maybe you want the user to be redirected to another page if he presses cancel or you want to perform some other action.

This can be a very easy task if you know how to do it. But if you don’t know how to do it, i will show you in this article.

So first we need to alter the form and add the button to the form array:

$form['cancel'] = array(
‘#type’ => ‘button’,
‘#value’ => t(’Cancel’),
‘#weight’ => 20,
‘#executes_submit_callback’ => TRUE,
‘#submit’ => array(’mymodule_form_cancel’),
);

Now let’s explain. The cancel button definition has to be somewhat similar to the submit button definition but with a few differences. For example the ‘#executes_submit_callback‘ property will result in the form being submitted when the user click on the Cancel button (By the way this property defaults to false for button type and to true for submit type form elements.). But with a difference. Now we can tell with the ‘#submit‘ property what function to be executed on the submit.

So you define another function in your module (the one specified in the submit property)

function mymodule_form_cancel(){
drupal_goto(’destinationpage’);
}

This function will be executed when the user clicked on the Cancel button. Isn’t this simple ?

Google Sidewiki or let’s see the quality sites now!

lacisoft — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:04:01 +0000

Google launched today an interesting feature. It is called Google Sidewiki and allows anyone to comment anything about a site. In short when you browse the internet you can post comments about a site and when someone else who has Sidewiki installed goes to that page he can see your comments, annotations about that site. It may happen that you researched hard to find a site on some subject, so you could write in Google Sidewiki that this is the most comprehensive page about the subject you’ve ever found, this way others will not waste their time searching further.

Google Sidewiki comes in the form of an extension to the Google Toolbar, so users of the Google Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer can use it. Others will have to wait for the implementation of this feature in Chrome or other browsers. To start using it you must install or update Google Toolbar from here

Its an interesting experiment from my point of view, just that every system has its weaknesses and this one’s weakness is the possibility to be abused by all kinds of “SEO experts”.