Factory Blogs Posts

Drupal Business Summit Vancouver 2012: The Trailer

Kevin Shoesmith — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 16:13:23 +0000

Drupal Business Summit Vancouver 2012: The Trailer

Kevin Shoesmith

March 16, 2012 - 9:13am

Drupal is being used in a wide range of industries and verticals including publishing, media, technology, non-profit, education, social, e-commerce, and the enterprise.

Here's what you can can expect at this year's Vancouver Drupal Business Summit based on this series of interviews conducted at the most recent Drupal Business Summit held in San Diego earlier this year.

Summit Organizers & Sponsors

Factory Interactive is proud to be a co-organizer and Platinum Sponsor of the event along with other sponsors: ImageX Media and The Jibe, Affinity Bridge, Agentic, and many more sponsors.

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Drupal Business Summit Vancouver 2012

Kevin Shoesmith — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:33:47 +0000

Drupal Business Summit Vancouver 2012

Kevin Shoesmith

February 3, 2012 - 2:33pm

Factory Interactive is extremely pleased to be a co-organizer and Platinum Sponsor of this year's Vancouver Drupal Business Summit. The event, happening on June 1, 2012, is a one-day event offering business leaders and managers insight into Drupal's capabilities as a versatile, business solutions framework. Drupal, one of the Internet's most widely used open source content management systems, has evolved into a platform able to support very complex websites and applications.

Geared toward VPs, Media Directors, Web Operations Managers, Marketing & Branding Leads, and Senior IT professionals, the summit will offer a highly-focused, non-technical look at Drupal. The day will be packed with sessions about Drupal as a viable, reliable solution for organizations of every kind. Attendees will hear real-world cases studies on high-profile and successful Drupal projects, have a chance to connect with top Drupal professionals, find out about trends for developing business apps, and share information with other business leaders about Drupal.

Featuring a great line up of speakers including Jeff Walpole whose company, Phase2 Technology, implemented Drupal as the system behind the WhiteHouse.gov website, the event is open to any business manager interested in learning about Drupal as a business solution.

Venue

UBC Robson Square

UBC Robson

800 Robson Street

Vancouver BC V6Z3B7

Registration

Reservations: $20

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Two Lightweight Linux Distributions

Kevin Shoesmith — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 04:19:15 +0000

Two Lightweight Linux Distributions

Kevin Shoesmith

December 9, 2011 - 8:19pm

I love hacking on Linux. All the languages and frameworks that I learned to program with work with run natively on Linux: Python, PHP, the usual suspects.

Since I made the move back to Mac two years ago, I've used my old Toshiba Satellite laptop (2007) to experiment with different Linux distros. I've installed versions of Redhat (which is a lot easier to intall than it was in 2004!), Debian, and Ubuntu. And I've enjoyed them all, especially Ubuntu.

But what I noticed in the latest upgrade to Ubuntu 11.something is that the OS is heavy and clumsy, maybe even a little fat. Fat == slow. Install it and see for yourself. It ain't what it used to be. So, I decided to look for something that fights in a lighter weight division. I need a faster interface.

With more than 250 actively maintained distributions available today, we have a lot of options of Linux to consider. Some of them are more evolved than others, and some are very specialized, but we think that these two are the next ones to try in our search for Linux lite:

!# CrunchBang

Based on Debian, CrunchBang evolved later than other lightweight derivative Linux distributions such as Xubuntu and Lubuntu. With a download size of just under 700MB, CrunchBang includes an impressive collection of software in its basic install.

CrunchBang is built almost entirely from packages available in the Debian repositories and has excellent compatibility with a huge range of software. And since I'm familiar with Debian, Ubuntu and its derivatives then CrunchBang is an obvious choice. And we like the look of it's interface.

Puppy Linux

The Puppy Linux distro runs completely in RAM, and should be compatible with decent selection of older hardware (often an issue with built-from-scratch distributions). Apparently, the software choices aren't enormous, but since my only concerns in using Linux these days are to write code, find things on the web, and type stuff, it fits the bill.

End note

While we were hunting down distros to try, we happened upon a rather interesting version of Linux for all those interested in talking a walk on the dark side: Ubuntu Satanic Edition.

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Copying a folder's contents to another folder on the command line

Kevin Shoesmith — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:51:32 +0000

Copying a folder's contents to another folder on the command line

Kevin Shoesmith

November 23, 2011 - 3:51pm

There have been many occasions on which I've wanted to copy all the sub-directories and files from one directory to another directory on the command line, but I didn't want to copy the containing directory itself. I was frustrated in trying to do this using the 'cp' command, but I was finding that when I typed

cp -r directory-a/ directory-b

it would copy directory-a and its contents to directory-b, not just the contents like I wanted.

The trick is to 'cd' into the directory of the contents you want to copy into another dir and type:

cp -apv . /path/to/directory-b

That will achieve the result you want while preserving the original files permissions and ownership in the process.

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Controlling Page Titles in Drupal 7 Using the Omega Theme and Display Suite

Kevin Shoesmith — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 05:21:42 +0000

Controlling Page Titles in Drupal 7 Using the Omega Theme and Display Suite

Kevin Shoesmith

October 21, 2011 - 10:21pm

Skip the windy preamble and go straight to the solution

The Problem

Sometimes it's troublesome to hide or remove page node titles in your Drupal theme. Too often the proposed way to hide page titles is clumsy and inflexible, effecting every content type on the site.

One of the things that's always been a bit finicky about using Drupal for us has been how to control page node titles at the content type level.

Until recently, we were aware of only a handful of ways to hide the default titles that most Drupal themes display for nodes automatically. Sometimes, if not most of the time, we didn't want those titles to appear because they either conflict with the proposed site architecture or we have some other reason for wanting to supress them. As easy as it is to rip out the code that displays titles from the page.tpl.php template, that approach prevents the title from appearing on any page of the site. The same goes for CSS related solutions like the display:none; option.

And there are other arduous., clumsy ways to achieve the effect too:

How to Make Optionally Hidden Node Titles in Drupal (Using CCK): Drupal 6
Hide the Node Title on a Page (6.x): Drupal 6
Hiding Node Titles: Drupal 6

You could even get into your template and add a little conditional code or some form or another, to display titles only for certain pages, but you'd better know a little php; not the solution for everyone.

But what about cases where you don't want the titles to appear for say, a Basic Page content type or whatever, but you do want titles for your Article content types like blog posts and news items? Then you need something a little more elegant, a little more flexible and controlled.

The Solution

The Omega theme allows site admins to toggle page titles for display on their sites, as other themes likely do. And if you design your content layouts using Display Suite, then you have the perfect combination for controlling page titles with flexibility and ease.

The winning combination for hiding page titles in Drupal is the Omega Theme and Display Suite. Display Suite is an indispensible module for controlling how your content is rendered on your site for different layouts. While we've been using the Omega Theme for most projects recently and know it best, this solution will likely work with any theme that allows admins to toggle page titles on and off.

Here's how we've been gaining control over our page titles in recent:

Download and install Display Suite for Drupal and enable it. Do this using Drush. If you don't use Drush already, there are few things I'd recommend more to a new (or veteran) Drupal developer than to learn to use this tool.
Turn off the Page Title display in your theme's settings. If you're using the Omega Theme, go to Appearance > "Your site sub-theme" Settings > Toggle advanced elements and deselect Page Titles if selected. This will turn off the Page Title display for all content type nodes on the site by default.
Go to the Manage Fields area for the Content Type for which you wish to show page titles.

If you want to set different displays for different view modes, like Full Content, RSS, or Teasers, select those under the "Custom display settings" tab and click Save. Then select "Layout for content type in default" where content type is the type you're modifying and default is the view type. For example, if you're modifying the display for Articles in Full Content, the tab title will read "Layout for Article in Full". Select a layout from the dropdown menu, then click Save again.
After saving, the Manage Display page should allow you to drag and drop fields to be displayed for that content type and display. You'll be able to modify settings in much the same way you can when creating views in the Views UI module. Make sure that Title is one of the enabled fields, then click Save.
Have a look at a node for that content type on the front side of the site to see if the page title appears, and style to taste.

This is a much, much more civilized method of controlling page titles than performing template surgery to remove titles like some kind of unwanted appendage. What's more, you now have control over what kinds of content will display page titles, and you can even assign them custom CSS classes and turn them into links too, if they're part of a list view for example.

Happy Drupaling!

Factory Interactive is a Drupal development company based in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

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Installing Drush on a Shared Linux Environment

Kevin Shoesmith — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 23:28:25 +0000

Installing Drush on a Shared Linux Environment

Kevin Shoesmith

September 12, 2011 - 4:28pm

Drush is a command line tool that makes creating, managing and maintaining your Drupal installation and its modules remarkably fast and efficient.

If you don't use the command line in the course of your web development work, spend the time to become familiar with some basic commands. Not only will it save you untold amounts of time and effort, it'll make you feel like a hardcore hacker.

As is often the case, jobs sometimes require installing and developing your Drupal site on a shared environment that you don't have root permissions for. While installing Drush on a server you have full control of is fairly straighforward, installing on a shared environment takes a few more steps.

Let's dive right in and see what's involved.

Prefatory note: If your web host doesn't allow shell access to its shared servers, you're out of luck and should think about using a different host. Yes, really.

Installing Drush

Open a terminal window (or terminal emulator in Windows), log in to your server, and browse to home directory of your account. Type the command:
```
ls
```
and press Enter to see the contents of the current folder. You'll know you're in the right directory if you see /public_html or /www in the list of files and folders. If not, change to the level above by entering:
```
cd ..
```
That will take you up one level in the directory structure. Repeat that process typing 'ls' each time, until you see you're in the right directory.
Look for the /bin directory. This is usually created by default with shared accounts, and contains the commands and utilities that you use to work on the server. When you see /bin listed, change to that directory by typing:
```
cd bin
```
If it's not there, create it by typing (at the prompt):
```
mkdir bin
```
Change directories so that you're in the newly created folder, again using the
```
cd
```
command, and download the tarball of latest version of Drush by typing:
```
wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drush-All-versions-x.x-xxxx.tar.gz
```
The file name of the tarball might be different, but you can find the latest version of the project at http://drupal.org/project/drush.
After the tar file downloads, extract it by entering:
```
tar xzvf drush-All-versions-x.x-xxxx.tar.gz
```
Then delete the tarball by entering:
```
rm drush-All-versions-x.x-xxxx.tar.gz
```
Change to the /drush/ directory by entering:
```
cd drush
```
and then enter:
```
chmod u+x drush
```
This ensures the drush file has the permissions is needs to be run when it's called.
So that we don't have to write out the full path to the Drush executable each time we want to use a Drush command, let's create a path to the Drush executable by making a path link. First, make sure you're still in the Drush folder and then type:
```
pwd
```
The path to the current directory will be printed for you. Copy the path, which might look something like
```
/home/bin/drush/
```
and then execute:
```
export PATH=$PATH:/home/mysite/bin/drush
```
Check that Drush has been successfully installed, and your link created by entering:
```
drush
```
on the command line. If you see a list of all the Drush commands listed on the screen, you're ready to roll with Drush!

Resources

A Command Line Primer for Beginners
Drush Project on Drupal.org
Installing Drush on Shared Hosting Accounts (detailed instructions on Drupal.org)
Command-Line Application Roundup
An A-Z Index of the Bash command line for Linux

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If I were the CEO of RIM

Kevin Shoesmith — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:14:24 +0000

If I were the CEO of RIM

Kevin Shoesmith

September 9, 2011 - 9:14am

I'd drop out of the device race.

Well, first I'd arrange for the disappearance of the other CEO. And then I'd drop out of the device race.

Except, perhaps, to offer the best keyboard components for handhelds in the market.

But frankly, no one that I've talked to cares about BlackBerry much. They don't care if the BlackBerry Playbook supports Flash or not. Flash is dead, the Playbook was stillborn, and the Blackberry smartphone is in palliative care.

So, now that I'm CEO and I have much less to worry about now that I'm not blowing millions of dollars on researching and developing second-string hardware (and an OS that no one wants and that developers won't develop for), I can focus on the thing that my company does best: developing secure enterprise level messaging and transaction platforms.

The mobile market is colossal. RIM already knows how to implement enterprise level services. Enterprises will need more innovative systems and subsystems to support their information and communication needs across devices.

If RIM opens the door wide, real wide, and creates SDKs and APIs for the BlackBerry Enterprise Server that hook into Google's mobile platforms (and Apple's if they can make the deal), times will get better.

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The Case of the Disappearing Products: Ghostbusting Magento

Kevin Shoesmith — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 20:03:00 +0000

The Case of the Disappearing Products: Ghostbusting Magento

Kevin Shoesmith

June 9, 2011 - 1:03pm

Magento is a deep, sophisticated e-commerce platform capable of enterprise level performance. While no system could ever be deemed perfect, Magento is a very well designed system that gives any organization the ability to set up elaborate product configurations. But that complexity can also make bug hunting a little tricky sometimes. Here's a recent case where figuring out why products were disappearing from the front end of a Magento site after updating them took some real work.

Last week we got a call from a business owner frustrated with a chain of events that forced him to change web hosts. In the process of migrating his site, something went wrong. Once the site was up on the new host's server, any time he changed and updated any of the products through the Magento control panel the products would disappear on the front of the site. By the time he'd come to us with his problem, he'd worked with a handful of people to troubleshoot the issue but no one could determine what was wrong.

The problem

The problem, simply put, is that when products were updated or reindexed in the Magento control panel, they would disappear from the front of the site when browsing by category. You could navigate to items and see them by entering a specific item's URL, but they weren't appearing in their respective categories. We tried many tips and bits of advice. We:

Checked inventory levels
Reindexed our product lists
Flushed the caches through the control panel
Emptied the /var/ cache files on server
Ensured the products were enabled in the product configuration
Ensured the products were visible in the product configuration
Checked that products were in the right categories in the cp

Nothing. Damn it, we were thinking, how far are we going to have to go to find this one?

The solution

Chris Boyd, Factory's systems engineer, embarked on a trace/reduction style process that involved the following steps. He:

Drilled down to the first SQL statement and found it was indeed returning the correct number of products
Determined that the SQL for filtering the products was completely filtering out all the results
Looked at the SQL a little closer and noticed it was JOINing based on customer group "0"
Removed the JOIN we discovered that the products showed up as they were supposed to. Restored the JOIN
Checked the customer groups to ensure that there was, in fact, a group with an ID of "0". No group with ID = 0
Saw that "not logged in" had an ID of "4"
Compared "not logged in" ID to other Magento installations and discovered it was "0"
Updated "not logged in" group ID to "0" on our problem site and everything returned to normal

We're not exactly sure what caused the problem in the first place since the data we were working with had already been exported from the original working site's database before migration.

The final word: if all other troubleshooting efforts fail, check to see that the "not logged in" group ID matches the JOIN in the product lists generated by the SQL query.

The files & methods

Here's list of the files and methods checked in the process outlined earlier: Magento ver. 1.4.0.1

app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Model/Layer.php getProductCollection() method, line 101 // gets the products for the current category
app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Model/Category.php applyProductLimitations() // gets the product collection for the current category

defined in

app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Model/Resource/Eav/Mysql4/Product/Collection.php, line 1283

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Drupal

Kevin Shoesmith — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 19:01:00 +0000

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Drupal

Kevin Shoesmith

March 14, 2011 - 12:01pm

It's the totality of Drupal, its gestalt, that makes me feel at peace.

Drupalcon 2011 taught me a few things about Drupal. And it confirmed a lot of others too. What it confirmed is that this software, now just 10 years old, has extraordinary momentum. Even bigger than I suspected. And that momentum isn't measured merely by the number of downloads or websites built on Drupal, but by its wider adoption as a engine that drives business. Big business.

But what Drupalcon taught me -- and it's this that I was hoping to learn more than anything else -- is that Drupal has a very, very bright future. This was important to hear because after six or seven years of kicking the tires on a lot of CMS's and frameworks -- Drupal, ExpressionEngine, Magento (eCommerce), ezPublish, WordPress, Ektron, Plone, and Umbraco, to name some -- it was time to get behind a worthwhile system.

While my company became very proficient with one of those systems (namely ExpressionEngine), we needed to make a decision about which system we were going to use as the foundation for the next phase of my business. It was a decision about an investment in our own future and an investment in a community that, for all appearances, seems very stable and thriving.

Dries Buytaert's keynote speech to some 4000 people on Day One of Drupalcon covered some of the things one would expect. He talked about Drupal 7's development, its recent January release, where Drupal came from, and where it is today. Dries might have been charged with being nostalgic in this, even self-aggrandizing, except that what followed during his talk suggests that he's doing anything but dwelling in the past.

And it all gives me great confidence. Here's why.

He's got a vision

A shared vision.

Part of what makes me so confident about moving to Drupal as a publishing framework of choice for my business is that its founder and leader, Dries Buytaert, isn't content to just let Drupal be an extremely powerful CMS that also does other things pretty well; he's got a pretty clear vision for it. And that vision seems as much formed by what its huge community of users are doing with it as it is formed by his own musings about what Drupal could be.

He said outright during his talk that had he started the project today, he would have created quite a different product. Citing statistics that say a very large percentage of web traffic, if not the majority, will be coming through mobile devices within the next two years, he would have focused more on making Drupal a framework that could deliver through the mobile channel first. HTML would be a big part of the picture, yes, but there would have been more interoperability and corresponding affordances for other uses. I'm sure you'd hear that from any other system's founder whose web framework has reached Drupal's maturity.

But the fact is that he is well down the road in integrating these elements already, and so are many contributors of Drupal's community. It's their efforts -- and the efforts of those who contribute to Drupal's organic growth in using it, extending it, and giving back with little expectations other than creating something good and a little peer recognition -- that make it one of the most successful open source projects today.

And that's what seems to give it such a big advantage. Because the vision is shaped and owned by all its contributors, Drupal is already well down the road to realizing that vision. And everyone involved genuinely seems to want to make Drupal something so much bigger and better than a cooperative collection of add-ons and extensions. Because it's theirs. It seems that there has never been any question about the community's role in directly shaping the product. This brings with it some challenges, of course, but those are heavily offset by the extraordinary evolution of the system. More on this in a bit.

The symbiotic ecosystem

The vision includes the growth of a healthy ecosystem, a host of inter-working components with a common DNA, a common source in Drupal. During his talk, Dries talked about the explosion of the mobile market. He quoted Nokia's CEO, Steve Elop, as saying that the marketplace wasn't just a "battle of devices", but rather a "war of ecosystems", one which Dries dryly pointed out Nokia is losing.

But that war is the reality which Dries and the Drupal community fully embrace. In its current state, the Drupal system is a mosaic of solutions for the way we build for the internet. Its future state, it's apparent, is a sophisticated ecosystem that supports multi-channel, interoperable development.

That means that Drupal will natively support multi-device publishing: HTML5 and CSS3 for web; web services for native mobile apps; and clean APIs for inter-system communication. These elements already exist in early incarnations as contributed modules, but they'll be baked into the core perhaps as early as Drupal 8 which is being planned now. And there's good news for the enterprise level organizations too -- Drupal also intends to have smoother interoperability with major CRM and ERP systems. Dries mentioned SalesForce, but perhaps he means LDAP, and ActiveDirectory, etc., too.

Conference talks by some of Drupal's current key contributors refer to the future that sees a scaled down core, lighter, its base functionality near flawless, but able to support bigger initiatives with fewer problems. And, above all, it's a Drupal that's been well designed for easier use, not just for developers, but end users too.

And we saw evidence of that ecosystem in some exciting presentations, not the least of which was a demonstration by Sumit Kataria about building native apps for iPhone and iPad. With a vision to have these functionalities make it into core as early as Drupal 8, adding to Drupal's sophisticated API, Drupal leaps out as a obvious choice to drive complex organizational or business initiatives.

The process of evolution

Indeed, Drupal's adoption rate is already so big, and getting bigger among much larger organizations, that its evolution will progress at a very rapid rate. And while that will create some challenges with respect to positive growth in the face of potentially huge, harried demands, the counterpoint is that the already colossal body of resources and practical applications for Drupal as a system will only grow deeper and wider. That, too, gives me peace because chances are that somewhere someone will have an answer to my questions when they appear.

No one denies that Drupal 7 took a long time to be released. Major software version cycles are typically quite long, lasting not just months, but years. This is particularly true when new versions promise ambitious additions and improvements, as with Drupal 7. And D7 doesn't disappoint. Between the time I first looked at Drupal in 2007 (I dismissed it quickly), the time I first developed with it in 2009, and now, it has come a very, very long way in terms of ability and usability.

Dries acknowledges that the list of features and modifications committed to the core was perhaps too big. At one point, there were more than 500 critical bugs. Fixing them was a task of daunting magnitude, whether there were five people working on fixing them, or 50.

But the lessons learned in the process have forced new processes, a system of checkpoints that are intended to produce a tighter product with fewer casualties. Practically, that translates into a gate system with cleaner introductions to core. Those gateways, broadly, are performance, accessibility, usability, documentation, testing, and a critical bug ceiling (fewer than 15). Through this process, introductions to core are much stronger, requiring far less work post-commit than during the Drupal 7 development.

That means a more stable system. More useful. More accepted. And sometimes more secure.

So what?

I came to Drupalcon to find out some things. For a couple of years I've been worried about being singularly dependent on a very small number of systems (basically, one) on which I rely to create business, develop applications, and serve clients. Two years ago is when I first really started looking deeper into Drupal. I'd met its advocates and proponents, I'd been taught by the best Drupalers in the game, and I knew about its growing wave of adoption. But I needed to see, first hand, that Drupal is the system that I can confidently use to advance my business, and that it has a community that I can rely on that is as much concerned about its future, and plays a key role in that future, as I am.

Will it be the only system we use in our business? Definitely not. There are others which will better serve different purposes. And we're already using those too. But Drupal will play a much larger role because of these things.

It comes down to trust. I've learned to trust that Drupal is headed in the right direction, guided by a forthright leader with good business sense and an appreciation for the ardent members of the community who authentically want to see it do well as well as he does.

And it's that totality -- the vision, the ecosystem, and the process-driven evolution -- that helped me stop worrying and love Drupal.

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Drupalcon Chicago 2011: Factory Interactive’s Picks

Kevin Shoesmith — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 17:42:00 +0000

Drupalcon Chicago 2011: Factory Interactive’s Picks

Kevin Shoesmith

February 10, 2011 - 9:42am

We just couldn't deny it any longer. Drupal is proving just too damn good to ignore.

Between the first time we looked into Drupal three or four years ago, to our initial experience working with it two years ago, to the launch of Drupal 7 which we're using now, we've seen Drupal evolve into an incredibly strong framework. And we're getting behind it in a big way.

So, we're heading to Chicago to dive head first into what's going on with one of the world's strongest open source communities and find out: what are the trends, the best practices, and the business cases that make Drupal a top choice on which to build small, medium and enterprise level web initiatives. And here's what interests us most at Drupalcon 2011.

Factory Interactive's Drupalcon Session Picks

Sessions are grouped by track. All times and locations for each session below are listed on the session's description page.

Factory Blogs Posts

Drupal Business Summit Vancouver 2012: The Trailer

Summit Organizers & Sponsors

Drupal Business Summit Vancouver 2012

Two Lightweight Linux Distributions

Copying a folder's contents to another folder on the command line

Controlling Page Titles in Drupal 7 Using the Omega Theme and Display Suite

The Problem

The Solution

Installing Drush on a Shared Linux Environment

Installing Drush

Resources

If I were the CEO of RIM

The Case of the Disappearing Products: Ghostbusting Magento

The problem

The solution

The files & methods

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Drupal

He's got a vision

The symbiotic ecosystem

The process of evolution

So what?

Drupalcon Chicago 2011: Factory Interactive’s Picks

Factory Interactive's Drupalcon Session Picks

Business & Strategy

Coder Track

Design & UX

Implementation & Config

Theming