Technology at Blue-Bag

Drupal Commerce Order display - Missing Template filename and path - .tpl.php

George — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 13:11:54 +0000

Wrestling with an error message on a Drupal Commerce site today. I kept getting errors relating to a missing template file with no path and no file name .tpl.php. Fortunatley with a little debugging giving me a pointer to the correct issue queue on Drupal the solution was readily available. So here's a few easy steps to follow in case you have the same issue.

Importing Products Displays and related Products to Drupal Commerce

George — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 23:08:35 +0000

In this post I am going to look at Drupal Commerce and demonstrate how to prepare e-commerce product data for import into Drupal Commerce - and show how to create a delimited list of product references to link the products to their display nodes. These techniques supplement the wealth of great practical demos and documentation provided by the Commerce team.

Top Car Dealership adopts Drupal

George — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 22:55:38 +0000

Kambara has just launched a new website design for Burton Kia at www.burtonkia.co.uk.

History of Parliament Online - Uses Drupal

George — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 22:51:28 +0000

We were engaged by the History of Parliament Trust to work on their flagship website that publishes the results of research into the members and constituencies of all British parliaments since 1386.

See for yourself at : http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org

This data rich web site is managed by the Drupal CMS and has tens of thousands of 'nodes'.

A case for the Drupal commerce detective

George — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 23:17:12 +0000

Finally solved a curious issue that has been nagging me on a test Drupal commerce site.
I have a utility script that lists products that are not linked to Product Displays (handy). Perplexingly the ‘report’ kept showing some orphaned products even though I had linked them all and the report had shown none previously.
It is a test site undergoing some heavy development so at first I put it down to that - rolling the database back and forth etc But today I noticed it and was pretty sure that nothing had changed that could cause such data changes. Could it be some bug in entity API, commerce ? Unlikely! So crack out the deer stalker and pipe lets investigate!

Drupal 7 commerce multi currency site using a price list

guy_schneerson — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 15:07:17 +0000

Below are my notes taken as I investigate techniques to achieve my Objective,
(This post is not a normalised set of instructions but the process I went through to figure out the best way to handle multiple currencies c objective)
if I get a chance ill create another post with a normalised set of instructions/explanation.

Objective

A custom/optional Drupal teaser in a view using the Views Custom Field module

guy_schneerson — Wed, 11 May 2011 13:06:25 +0000

A client needed implementing a custom teaser/short description for a CCK field (not the body) in his Drupal 6 site. The requirements: if the short description/ teaser is available use it otherwise get the data from the CCK field. It is important to note that Display Suite Drupal module was not available as I think it provides a much better approach (will post about in the future).

I have used the Views Custom Field module , this adds a PHP field that allows us to add PHP code to a view.

Drupal Node actions

guy_schneerson — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 11:24:03 +0000

Drupal nodes typically have an Edit and View links (rendered as tabs at the top of the node by most themes).

Ever wanted to add you own links so you can add custom functionality?
This can be used to automatically populate node data.

The below example will show you how to add a link titled “reviewed” to an article node type, this link will prompt the user for a comment and set two cck field “reviewed” and “note”.

This is not intended as a real example but as an illustration of the how the following techniques can be used as the bases for the creation of powerful work flow.
The techniques covered are
•   hooking into the Drupal menu routing system
•   form creation and validation
•   node manipulation (node_load and node_save)
•   url redirect

Drupal Building blocks

guy_schneerson — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 16:08:03 +0000

- Talk notes from the BAD Monday meetup

By Guy Shneerson of Blue-Bag Ltd (www.blue-bag.com) Guy@blue-bag.com

Notes form my presentation at the Brighton Area Drupal meetup (BAD monday) on Monday 18/04/2011 at the Skiff

Thanks to Steve for organising the evening and to all that attended

960 Robots theme - unwanted tweets in header

George — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 16:31:17 +0000

You'll notice that we are using the excellent 960 Robots Drupal theme for this blog. We aim to showcase several contributed modules and themes over time to show how they can be setup and used etc - using this site as a basis for video casts - in case you were wondering why we don't use our own themes... ; )
Great theme and easy to set up with great features out of the box.
One of the features of this theme is the random tweets in the header. Nice example of how to pull an external sites API query into your site - in this case Twitter.

Kambara - Site for social media marketing expertise goes live

George — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 14:38:05 +0000

We have worked together with Kevin Ruston for many years - relying on his wealth of knowledge to assist customers with search engine optimisation and social media marketing campaigns. So as a platform for us to work together as a tighter team, we have created kambara a new team based working community to provide SEO and Social media marketing skills along side our design and development services.

Drupal Blueprint theme playing SEO nicely with other modules

George — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 14:07:57 +0000

Getting your page title and metatags correct is great for SEO and enables your readers to locate your content by getting it indexed well.
In this post we'll see how to get your modules and theme to play nicley together to ensure that your page structure is optimal for web standards and indexing. In most cases this can be sorted with a simple fix.

Drupal duplicates Content Type metatags

George — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:43:54 +0000

You may have noticed if you have looked at the page source of Drupal sites that they often have two content type metatags

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> 
<title>Homepage | Page Title</title> 
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> 

This is a remnant of a security fix to ensure that the page always had a content type. (you can read all about it here http://drupal.org/node/451304

Drupal Ubercart - Changing your 'cart' to your 'basket'

George — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 09:25:31 +0000

If you use the Ubercart module suite for Drupal to create e-commerce sites (we do and love it!) then one of the things you may wish to do is to change the default 'cart' to 'basket' - for a non-US audience. There is no setting in the Ubercart modules to enable this - but it is really easy and here's how to do it.
Get the excellant string overrides module and install it. Then set it up to swap the following fields:
Original - Replacement

Working with large (Drupal) taxonomies

George — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:17:18 +0000

Drupal is great and the taxonomy system is great - but large taxonomies (over 1,000 terms are a headache for any system) and Drupal is no different. I have a new taxonomy for a project with > 5k terms in a three deep hierarchy and using it presents some usability, performance and other issues.
So I though I would take a break and write a bit about evaluating some Drupal contributed modules for working with large taxonomies:

handling 404 errors on hosted CMS

George — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 14:21:46 +0000

A general housekeeping task for CMS systems such as Wordpress and Drupal and other websites and good practice to keep your site SEO high is to make sure you are gracefully handling missing pages (404 errors).
One of the routine tasks to carryout is checking for crawl errors in Google Webmaster tools. If you see any missing pages in the list it is worth making sure you have some measures in place to handle these and ideally issue a 301 redirect so that Google and other search engines update their indexes.

Safe guard your web site with routine web log analysis and forensics

George — Mon, 24 May 2010 15:48:54 +0000

Whether you are running Drupal,Wordpress, Expression engine, Joomla or in fact any web site one of the regular tasks you should carryout on your web site is a bit of log analysis. It is often left up to modules, plug ins or someone else to protect your web site until it too late.
We all rely on Google Analytics to tell us about visitors and maybe use our log analysis software (AWStats, Webaliser etc) to report on log entries - but it is always worth using tools locally to dig deeper into your logs. These can range from simple reports on accesses to your site to more detailed forensic analysis of site activity.
By doing this we get to know better how visitors are accessing our site and can uncover some interesting answers to questions such as:

How often is Google actually spidering my site?
How many errors am I getting and what are they?
Who is stealing my content?
Is anyone trying to crack my site?

In this post I will briefly cover some useful techniques to analyse you logs and see if any one is abusing your hospitality.

Trouble shooting Cron?

George — Mon, 24 May 2010 11:54:08 +0000

It ducked!
Monday morning the sun is shining and your email box is full of emails saying cron is failing on one of your sites.
In this post I will look at what is going on, how you can troubleshoot it and fix it and how life may be made easier in the future by a) adding a bit of logging to cron and b) features in Drupal 7.

Customising your Drupal maintenance page

George — Thu, 20 May 2010 12:56:54 +0000

So you have created your Drupal site,configured to be as search engine friendly as you can, added loads of good content and all is well - traffic is building up and you are getting great feedback from regular visitors. Then some updates to your modules are available and you need to put the site into maintenance mode whilst you upgrade these - and that is when you find that the maintenance Site Offline page is in the classic minelli theme and that isn't what you want at all. In this post I will show you how to theme your maintenance pages in under 5 minutes with 3 simple steps.

Adding thumbnails to WordPress posts

George — Tue, 18 May 2010 16:33:21 +0000

One of the features of Wordpress 2.9 was the addition of support for Thumbnails in posts. One of the frequent question we get is How do I show thumbnails in posts?

If your theme supports thumbnails then on the post edit page you will see a Post Thumbnail box at the bottom of the right column.

If your theme doesn't 'natively' support thumbnails - you can fix it with a few lines of code.

The first thing to do is to locate the functions.php file in your theme directory and add the following snippet:

Module Weights

George — Thu, 13 May 2010 15:50:31 +0000

Some modules use the same hook and therefore are 'called' in succession. Sometimes you would like (need) a particular module to fire after or before other modules. An example is the XML site map module that would best fire after the pathauto module to ensure that the site map contains the final version of the urls used for pages in your site. There are a number of ways to manage this -

Linking your Wordpress blog to Twitter

George — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:47:39 +0000

In this post I'll look at using a couple of Plugins to link your Wordpress site to Twitter. This is a great way of publicising your blog and letting your viewers keep up with what is going on on your site.

Your First User, Permissions and Roles

George — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:51:22 +0000

When you first install Drupal it creates the master user (1) - this should ideally not be used to create content and it is good practice to create a new user for administrative purposes (not called admin but with an equivalent set of permissions) and an administrators group so that the super user doesn't get used - it may even be worth blocking the super user once you have done that. But be aware that some modules need to impersonate that user. If you want to restrict login for that user you can create an Access Rule to deny Admin for user name - this will effectively disallow logging in as Admin.

User Login Page not available to logged in user

George — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:04:34 +0000

Issue: In a Drupal site a logged in user gets a 403 page (access denied) if they browse to the user/login page. Well? (I hear you ask) Why do you want to see the login page if you are logged in?? Good question - but it is not really an error or an access denial issue is it - it is more a 'user path/flow' issue. A good solution would be to see the user's own profile page.

Configuring Cron on a hosted server

George — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 21:27:17 +0000

One of the first steps to setting up a new Drupal site is to setup the regular Cron job. Hosting services vary in their support for cron and the usual methods (such as wget, curl etc). This post explores options to configure cron on a hosted server.

Configuring Cron on a local WAMP server

George — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 21:18:46 +0000

When you develop CMS sites it is best practice to have local development copies as opposed to working directly on the live production server. If you have multiple such sites on a WAMP install you will need to mange cron to keep these up to date. In this post we look at a number of options available to you.

Securing access to files on your website

George — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:25:48 +0000

It is easy to forget that the files in your web site are visible to anyone even if they are not linked to or are not files normally requested. In this post we look at how to use the.htaccess file to control access to your site.

To www or not to www

George — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:17:23 +0000

One of the trends these days is to lose the www. from your domain name.
Arguments for are usability (e.g. you don't have as much typing to do - it is easier to not have to say dubyadubyadubya every time you give out your web address).
There are counter arguments of course to do with cookie control and sites that have sub-domains etc.
What is important though is that you choose one and stick to it. In any event you should decide for one and not allow both.
Supporting both will cause duplicate content in Google and you may suffer in SEO terms.

htaccess Rewrites - Discarding the unwanted Querystring

George — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 12:25:12 +0000

I use the .htaccess file a lot on hosted servers. On our own servers I prefer to use the httpd.conf as it performs better and is not reevaluated on every request. But if you are on a hosted server the .htaccess is your earliest port of call for handling incoming traffic and can be more efficient than using modules for certain tasks. One common gotcha is how to discard the querystring for a redirect.

Path Rewriting and changes to Path Auto

George — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:59:00 +0000

Quick note: On a site I worked on recently I made a change to the Pathauto settings and needed to create a load of Redirects for previous URLs. Fortunately there is a quick way to do this using wildcards in the htaccess.