Blogs of a Technical Nature - Tutorials etc.
Submitted by gareth on Fri, 16/12/2011 - 17:13
While a coder may not have a great deal of time or indeed the answer to any of the accessibility problems encountered in using Drupal, there are still numerous ways that some minor coding skills can used to massively help out with the accessibility of Drupal.
While this is written specifically with Accessibility in mind the skills are very transferrable and can be used for any initiative you may want to help out with.
Most new development is happening in Drupal 8 at the moment so you will need to get the latest version of that first:
Submitted by gareth on Wed, 08/06/2011 - 12:36
CAVEAT EMPTOR
This is a very rough start to the setup instructions, more will be added as I progress and full english will be added rather than the rough notes that exist at present
Site Demo
There is a demo site available to see how this theme looks in comparison to the site5 version, it can be found at:
http://boldy.dev.garethalexander.co.uk or http://boldy.d7.garethalexander.co.uk
Submitted by gareth on Tue, 29/03/2011 - 12:39
Now that Drupal have moved from CVS to the git versioning system, I realised that my github workflow can get even more of a workout and is doubly useful to me as I can now use it for Drupal contributions as well. The previous workflow is here: Github Workflow.
There are only a couple of differences between using Drupal's git and github.
Submitted by gareth on Mon, 13/09/2010 - 21:48
The only post you'll ever need to test a template
The aim of this post is to write a page that contains all the elements of html that I'll ever use. For the purpose of theme development to ensure all elements are properly styled.
The purpose of this HTML is to help determine what default settings are with CSS and to make sure that all possible HTML Elements are included in this HTML so as to not miss any possible Elements when designing a site.
Submitted by gareth on Fri, 11/06/2010 - 15:54
When you get older you need to write functions to help you though the day:
Submitted by gareth on Thu, 27/05/2010 - 20:31
I was recently asked to block users from signing up to a drupal site using a hotmail email address.
To achieve this I wrote a small module that will intercept the validate operation of the user module and add in an extra validation on the mail field of the user registration or edit form.
Create your dot info file: hotmail_check.info
; $Id$
name = Hotmail Check
description = "Removes the ability to login with a hotmail email address."
core = 6.x
Then create your dot module file: hotmail_check.module
Submitted by gareth on Fri, 16/04/2010 - 14:47
I wrote a little linux bash script that I get cron to run each night to create a backup of my drupal site. I may expand it later to include auto deletion of older files and database dumps, but for the meantime I will just manage the backup files manually.
Basically create a file and call it something like site_backup.sh
Submitted by gareth on Tue, 09/03/2010 - 11:59
The format
The drupal 6 link function takes the format of:
l($text, $path, $options = array())
This will format an internal Drupal link.
This function correctly handles aliased paths, and allows themes to highlight
links to the current page correctly, so all internal links output by modules
should be generated by this function if possible.
Parameters
$text - The text to be enclosed with the anchor tag.
$path - The Drupal path being linked to, such as "admin/content/node". Can be an external or internal URL.
Submitted by gareth on Wed, 17/02/2010 - 13:09
When programmatically creating a new content type I would like to set the default publishing options, comment settings and upload settings, as the content type is installed, so I create a dot install file for the content type with the following:
Submitted by gareth on Mon, 02/11/2009 - 22:42
In order to keep track of versions of your code, or just to keep a record of the changes you make to code, github.com is an alternative VCS to the popular SVN. Here are some steps to ensure your code is kept up to date, even if you are sharing your codebase with other developers.
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