Drupal

Why Solr?

Posted by Hani Atalla on Tuesday, March 3, 2015 - 12:25 Drupal solr, search api, Faceted Search

When it comes to setting-up search for a Drupal site, out-of-the-box Drupal comes with a primitive built-in search engine. The out-of-the-box search engine can be sufficient if we are running a Content Management System (CMS) for a small blogging site. There are some basic customization and ranking settings that can be tailored; e.g. add more weight to blogs with more comments or recently submitted blogs or content. And it is neat because Drupal search respects node access permissions.

But not all...

A BACnet Module for Drupal

Posted by David Thompson on Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - 09:38 Drupal BACnet, Drupal, Energy Dashboards, Free, Energy Management, Facility Management, BTL, OpenEnergy

A new project unites technology of two of the world’s leading “open” communities; ASHRAE - in the form of the BACnet [1] open communication protocol and Drupal [2] - in the form of its open source content management system. The coupling of these two technologies and training of the user base can go a long way towards incentivizing efficient energy use patterns at commercial buildings that use BACnet compliant devices to manage such building systems as heating, cooling, dehumidification, utility metering, and ventilation.

The Drupal BACnet...

Acquia Certification Exam - Worth it?

Posted by Casey Fox on Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - 14:21 Drupal Acquia, Certification, Exam

I once read “Certifications are a useful indicator only when people don't know how to look for other indicators.” It’s great for recruiters to see, for future employers who not be completely familiar with Drupal, or developers new to Drupal and don’t have the strong presence or portfolio. However for the thousands of established developers, some may see it as an addition to their portfolio while others may see it as a waste of time and money, but at $250, it’s probably worth an attempt.

Since Acquia launched the exam one question I’ve been seeing a lot is: “Does Drupal need a...

Contributing to Drupal Core

Posted by Casey Fox on Monday, October 13, 2014 - 14:06 Drupal Drupal Core, Code, Contributing

So you’ve decided to contribute to Drupal core! Fabulous! Welcome to the club! As with anything Drupal, there’s a slight learning curve, but nothing as daunting as learning Drupal in the first place. As always with almost anything Drupal, there’s a wealth of information and documentation available on Drupal.org.

First things first, you need a dev environment. In this tutorial we’ll be talking about using the Acquia Dev Desktop Beta 2. Just install and launch and you’re ready to start. Take note of the base folder, as you’ll be...

Introduction to Drupal 7 Maps - OpenLayers

Posted by Jon Reid on Friday, October 3, 2014 - 12:50 Drupal, Web Experience Management Drupal, Map, OpenLayers

This article is the first in a series on mapping in Drupal. There are a few online tutorials on using OpenLayers in Drupal but successful implementations are still hard to achieve for many. We’re going to start with the simplest possible implementation using OpenLayers.

Modules Required

First, the obvious module: OpenLayers. And then the OpenLayers Dependencies:

● Libraries - this gives us easy access to external...

Your Drupal Site API

Posted by Hani Atalla on Monday, September 8, 2014 - 12:48 Development, Drupal Drupal, API, RESTful, services module

As IT citizens, we are often pictured while glued to our monitors doing whatever we need to do to keep software humming on servers or porting applications from legacy technologies to more up-to-date software stack or trying to figure out why things work one way on environment Y while when the exact same code deployed in environment X the app just decides to stall. Well, I think you know what I mean: we spend countless hours hunched in front of our monitors neglecting that we need to also hum that vital organ in our chests to maintain our own health and a decent fitness level. In an effort...

Converting Basic HTML/CSS into a Drupal Theme

Posted by Casey Fox on Monday, August 4, 2014 - 12:03 Drupal theming, drupal theme

Drupal offers some great free theme options, but what if you already have a website theme? What if the options just don’t fit the subject of your website? The idea of creating a custom Drupal theme from scratch may seem daunting, but even with next to no knowledge of PHP, it can be accomplished! Drupal...

Drupal Coming Soon to a Phone Near You!

Posted by Avani Cheriathundam on Thursday, January 9, 2014 - 17:00 Cool Tools, Development, Drupal Drupal, Drupal8

Happy new year everyone! With the start of 2014 comes the much anticipated release of Drupal 8. While the official release date hasn’t been determined yet, it is being marketed as the most customizable and adaptable release of Drupal. The following features has been included that are particularly aimed to help End users/clients: Authoring – using the Spark project to review what was currently available in the market for out of the box functionality, Drupal 8 will allow in line editing which can be used for...

Modal Options in Drupal 7

Posted by Jon Reid on Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - 13:26 Drupal Drupal

The modal, the less obtrusive cousin of the popup window, is an effect that overlays a page element over a webpage. In contrast to the popup browser window, a modal also restricts access to the underlying page until the modal receives some interaction from the user. Why use a modal? There are several use cases including the awesome obliteration of the need to ever use a popup again. Perhaps the best reason is that a modal allows you to show and/or receive information from your end user without requiring a page reload. In short, a modal can improve usability by increasing the amount of...

Beware: Watchdog is a Hog

Posted by Hani Atalla on Monday, June 10, 2013 - 13:37 Best Practices, Drupal Drupal, Syslog, Watchdog

A neat monitoring agent that will run inside your Drupal PHP engine is New Relic. With New Relic we can monitor the PHP application performance as well as the overall health of the Drupal site in terms of under-the-hood metrics: database performance, error rate, response time, sluggish modules/APIs (it can locate these down to the line of code causing the site to spin at a zillion CPU cycle a second. So, it is a handy tool to have...