16/03/201616 of the Best Modules for Drupal 7
As a follow up to our previous article - 12 Modules You Need to Know About - we've been asked about top Drupal modules which are essential to any web design and development project.
So, here is a list of the best modules for Drupal 7 that we routinely add to every project we set up. I haven't included drupal modules such as Ctools or Entity in this list… Read More
03/03/2016Design for Ed Sheeran's First Web Site
We built Ed Sheeran's first website - so I guess you could say we were partly responsible for his huge success :o)
Great Design & E-commerceElements of the design we did back in 2007 are still in use today. This layout isn't actually what we ended up going live with, but it gives you some idea of where we were going. The finished site even had an e-commerce element, but I don't remember what we were selling - Cd's and mp3's I guess.
Doesn't he look young?
09/02/201612 Drupal Modules That You Need To Know About
Drupal is an open source modular web development system, there are lots of modules out there but they are not all as good as they might seem. Over the years we have researched and tested hundreds of modules for different tasks, here are some of our favourites for Drupal 7.
1. Backup and Migratehttps://www.drupal.org/project/backup_migrate
This is probably one you already know about, but if you… Read More
22/01/20165 Ways to Make Your Drupal Website Faster
Drupal websites can benefit from a little bit of care and attention to fine tune their performance. Here are some tips for how to speed up your page loads.
Advagg - advanced aggregation This is a massively powerful module which manages all of the css and javascript generated by the many and varied elements of your website. It combines these into small compressed files which speed up your page load - and can also move blocking items to the footer to improve the speed… Read More
04/12/2015Why you should be resizing images for your website
It is very important to resize your images before uploading to your website, mainly to save you lots of time.
Back in the days before Content Management Systems (CMS) we used to hard code all the text and images on a web page. We had control over the quality and file size of the images we used. These days the content on most websites is managed by the business owner which can sometimes be tricky especially where images are concerned!
Photos taken with modern digital cameras can be anything up to 20MB+ depending on your camera… Read More
03/12/2015Site Launch - M&B Surfaces
Our latest website launch is for M&B Surfaces, one of our long-standing clients. M&B provide garden and play surfacing products and services (and much more besides) to both the trade sector and retail customers. Earlier this year we made a new website for the retail side of the business playbark.com, an ecommerce website. The M&B website is a brochure and catalogue site to showcase their trade-only offering - so there are no online sales. Customers… Read More
23/11/2015A Brief History of Web Page Design and Build
When I started making web sites way back in 1996, the internet was a very different place and web sites were very different beasts. It's hard now to imagine that large sites were made of flat HTML files- but that is all there was! Since then, the technology and I have both come a long way, first databases, then CMSs, it's very hard to guess what the next step will be.
My First Web DesignThe first web page I ever made was reverse engineered from a page on the AOL site. It was 1996 or maybe 97, and I wanted to make… Read More
11/11/2015Keep Control of Your Assets With Drupal
I was just going through some training materials for dentsplymea.com and came across the system that we developed for them to upload video files, get them encoded and add them to web pages. It's the kind of thing which is pretty easy to do via YouTube and embedding a code snippet, but a bit more difficult if you are determined that your company is going to keep control of it's intellectual property.
The system we built uses https://zencoder.com and the Drupal video module -… Read More
11/11/2015Setting Up Mixed Mode SSL with Drupal 7
Previously we looked at setting up https across the whole site, if you want to set it up only on specific pages - drupal https mixed content - you have to jump through a couple of hoops.
The first problem is patching core - and living with this across future updates! The answer to this patching with drush make. To do this you will need a make file something like this:
; Specify the version of Drupal being used. core = 7.x ; Specify the… Read More
28/10/2015New Site Designed for the Champagne Academy
We've just launched a new site for The Champagne Academy an august body representing the top 16 champagne houses. The Academy runs annual courses educating the very best in the hospitality industry in the specifics of elite champagne.
The Champagne Academy had a previous site built many years ago using a do-it-yourself system which in turn had generated pages using Flash - a very unsatisfactory situation!
Assets were missing and hard to source and we had to… Read More
14/09/2015Secure your E-commerce website with SSL and Drupal 7
The situation with SSL and Drupal 7 is all a bit of a mess, there is a module - Secure Pages - which allows mixed use, but it seems to be riddled with problems and needs core to be patched! So, what is the alternative? After a frustrating day, I've finally got the method, so here it is before I forget...
In settings php you need to add the following - it is NOT there in the default version:
$_SERVER['HTTPS'] = 'on';
This then works with these re-write rules which are now baked into D7 .htaccess
RewriteRule ^ - [E… Read More
13/01/2015Drupal Commerce & Turtlereality
For the last few e-commerce sites that Turtlereality have built we have switched our allegiance from Ubercart to the new kid on the block - Drupal Commerce. It's been a challenging process but ultimately very worthwhile and rewarding. It's a steep climb up the hill, but the view from the top is definitely worth it.
Best Practice E-commerceDrupal Commerce started life as an off-shoot of Ubercart after a bunch of programmers decided that they needed to start again from scratch… Read More