kirkdesigns.co.uk - web design and development

A comparison of online wireframing / prototyping tools

tom — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:47:00 +0000

Wireframing is an important aspect of web development. A decent wireframe developed at the start of a project can really help to reduce development times further down the road.

Color Scheme Designer - A web tool to generate colour palettes

tom — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 15:32:36 +0000

Color Scheme Designer 3 is neat little tool that can help you generate new and appealing colour schemes. It has a slick web based interface, a wide range of options and some really great hidden features.

New Drupal module: Environment Indicator

tom — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 18:19:09 +0000

The Environment Indicator adds a coloured strip to the side of the site informing you which environment you're currently in (Development, Staging, Production etc). This is incredibly useful if you have multiple environments for each of your sites, and like me, are prone to forgetting which version of the site you are currently looking at.

Make a Drupal Block Visible for Entire Site Sections but NOT Specific Sub-sections or Pages

tom — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 15:09:02 +0000

This little php snippet has come to the rescue many times throughout my Drupal development days. It lets you use includes and excludes in your Drupal block visibility settings - something that you can not do out of the box.

For example, it would allow you to:

How to customise the comment form in Drupal 6

tom — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 12:44:56 +0000

Most forms in drupal can be customised, or 'themed' by writing a few lines of code in your theme's template.php file. However, the comment form is one of a few exceptions where this doesn't work - not with a little extra magic anyway. As always, there is more than one possible approach, some of them are good, some bad. In this article, we'll be doing it the right way - The Drupal way.

Case Study : Concern Fast

tom — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:11:57 +0000

Each year, thousands of people around Ireland join Concern Worldwide in the Concern Fast. During the Fast, people give up food for 24 hours and raise as much money as they can for some of the world’s poorest people.

Book Review: Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery

tom — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:07:17 +0000

This weekend I took the time to get stuck into one of Packt Publishing's Drupal titles, Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery. In this book, Matt Butcher takes the reader through the basics of using JavaScript within Drupal themes and modules, with a heavy emphasis on the all popular jQuery library.

Cross browser web testing on Linux - Playonlinux

tom — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 19:15:46 +0000

For the past year I have been running a full blown PC inside a virtual machine (vmware) in order to allow me to run Internet Explorer, Chrome and various other Windows based web browsers. Don't get me wrong, I have no desire to run Internet Explorer! But, as a web developer it's kind of a necessity.

Drupal 6 media streaming: Media Mover, FLV Media Player and XSPF Playlist

tom — Sun, 24 May 2009 08:01:26 +0000

Having just completed building another Drupal media streaming website and I thought I'd take the time to share some of my experiences, especially seeing as two of my most popular articles are about Drupal and media streaming (Drupal 6 video streaming roundup and Drupal 6 media streaming with Dash Media Player). Things however, have come along a fiar bit since I wrote those articles.

New Drupal 6 module: IP to Locale

tom — Sun, 03 May 2009 15:03:22 +0000

Drupal is set up fairly well for multilingual sites. However, it does make the assumption that each site version will be in a different language. It is quite feasible however, that there be two versions of a site in the same language. For example, A site which has a UK version, and a version for the Republic of Ireland. Both sites are written in English, but the content varies for each.