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
22/04/20148 Things We Love About CiviCRM Web Design & Development
We've recently developed and launched a new site for our long-time client OUCH(UK). It uses a combination of Drupal, CiviCRM web design and CiviCRM development, which provides the foundation for them to take their organisation to the next level.
What is CiviCRM web design?So,… Read More
12/10/2013Drupal - take control of your web site content
Web sites are becoming increasingly more complicated. As the complexity increases, site owners are demanding better tools to take control of content. Drupal's "backup and migrate" and "revisioning" modules handle these jobs elegantly and give control back to site owners.
There are four key areas:
Control of site data revisions Publishing and content approval Disaster Recovery Server Migration Data RevisionsThe revisioning module saves every version of a page that is ever made. When you first create a page - or a blog post… Read More
13/09/2013Internet Time is Like Dog Years
Internet years are like dog years - I dog year is the same as 7 human years so, the joke is that if you fly your dog to LA, the jet lag is 7 times as bad for him! And if you leave your website without updates for as long as your print material - it will start to look a little jetlagged itself.
Web Design Changes FastLet's roll back a little and try and explain what the problem is. The internet moves fast. Really fast. You think you have just caught up and you find a whole new sub-culture has emerged, blossomed and died and you… Read More
26/06/2013How wide do you want your website - how wide is your device?
A long time ago in a galaxy far away I wrote an article about how wide a web page should be. The answer at the time could be summed up as "960 pixels". Such simple times we lived in! Then along came inventions such as, the wheel, fire, the internal combustion engine and, more recently, tablet computers.
Back in the old days, the PC era, you knew pretty much what sort of screen people were looking at your site on, it was somewhere between 800x600 pixels and 1600*1000 pixels - but most people were in a much narower band of about 1000… Read More
31/01/2013Why We Also Love Ubercart
Following a recent article about why we love Drupal it occured to me that we also love Ubercart - and for many of the same reasons.
Support from a large worldwide community
Ubercart is a community effort - it can't go bust or stop trading. Even if the key personnel stopped being involved, there are enough developers around the world with a vested interest in keeping the software going - or at least in making it easy to migrate elsewhere. Also with such a large user base, any problem you come up against has probably been faced… Read More
31/01/2013Word Perhect Q & A
I've just been asked some questions by an MA student in Birmingham and I thought I would post the answers here. In general, how would you describe what you do? Designer? Programmer? Would you call what you do "Art"? I would normally call myself a designer and programmer as that is mainly what I do. Originally I wanted to be a musician but it's just too difficult to make money from music and I'm just not that committed to it, so I do the next best thing which is still creative but pays the bills.
The work that I normally do is… Read More
31/01/2013How Wide Do You Want Your Website?
Sometimes when I'm working on a website, I'll be halfway through coding the interface when the client suddenly says something like “there's a gap between my site and the edge of the screen” or “So, my site will stretch to fit the whole screen won't it?” or even the dreaded “can you make it so that it doesn't scroll?”. This is generally followed by a bit of a pause, a (very small) sigh and an attempt to explain the dilemmas of website design over the phone and without the use of visual aids.
So, here is my chance to make a better job… Read More