where fluff meets grit
PHP
Developing a custom content system
Dec 20th
We’ve worked with Practical Action for many years developing their site and online presence, but back in 2010 they took the bold step to completely overhaul their site. This naturally involved considering both changes to the design and the system on which the site was built. After considering a few different systems the team decided on a bespoke path that led to the creation of a custom Content Management System that really establishes new foundations for the site to develop over the coming years.
Starting with the redesignThe design process was exiting, and working on such a large site was always going to be More >
Building Magento around Booksonix
Dec 19th
Practical Action Publishing approached FLUID7 to redesign their Development Bookshop. It was an exciting opportunity to move them off of an ageing OSCommerce site and into a shiny new Magento instal. To really spice things up we wanted to connect their shop with their book management software, Booksonix. Creating a slick solution that pulls new and updated titles from Booksonix into Magento automatically, cutting out the need for the team to manage titles in both applications independently.
You can check out the new bookshop here: http://developmentbookshop.com/
Redesigning the Bookshop
The new design pulled in core styles that had been created for the recent group site redesign for Practical Action. Presenting More >
The Talent Business Redesign
Dec 15th
Designer Ben Merrington got us onboard to deliver his designs for the thetalentbusiness.com. This redesign for The Talent Business, provider of senior talent to communications agencies and creative businesses around the globe, needed to utilise the latest web-tech. The result is smooth HTML5 & CSS3 transitions, some pretty special Ajax content loading and all built on our in-house CMS.
On the outside
This really was an exciting contract to work on. Not only are the designs great, but the requirement to make the experience as slick as possible allowed us to get really geeky with the latest techniques. Take a look at More >
Drupal – Theming to keep your modules modular
Oct 13th
Drupal is a powerful CMS and allows us as developers to create very bespoke web sites and applications.
I tend to create a module for every website to handle its Page and Block declarations. But its messy and not to mention unconventional to include HTML in your modules. I want to share how to theme your page declarations and any other piece of HTML for that matter to keep your modules tidy. (more…)
Magento – Add custom content layouts for CMS pages
Sep 30th
Sometimes in the main content block of your theme, the design requires to have a complicated CMS page content layout that stray from using basic linear content (Adding blocks below whatever is under the main content block). You may want various blocks to be set anywhere you want EG the homepage..
This post shows a good clean way to use the layout XML and PPH in your layout files to position blocks of content exactly where you want inside your main content block. (more…)
Drupal CSS aggregator
Sep 3rd
A couple of pointers when you’re getting into theming Drupal the correct way rather than just hacking around as is most fun.
I seem to hit troubles getting the aggregator feature of Drupal working, and often end up just slapping an external CSS link call in to the page template.
The proper way to do is a little long winded, but gives us the speed optimisations offered by the aggregator facility. Instead of putting <link … /> in the page.tpl.php file, use the drupal_add_css() function in your template.php file.
The best place to put it is in a function called <themename>_preprocess_page().
And here’s an example of More >
osCommerce redirect error when SSL enabled and shop directory is different to NONSSL directory
Dec 4th
I found the solution to this issue from a thread on the forums. It means making a correction to the tep_redirect function in functions/general.php.
You need to add the DIR_WS_HTTPS_CATALOG constant into the url transformation part…
Before:
// Redirect to another page or site function tep_redirect($url) { $url = str_replace(‘&’, ‘&’, $url); //Ampersand fix if ( (strstr($url, “\n”) != false) || (strstr($url, “\r”) != false) ) { tep_redirect(tep_href_link(FILENAME_DEFAULT, ”, ‘NONSSL’, false)); }
if ( (ENABLE_SSL == true) && (getenv(‘HTTPS’) == ‘on’) ) { // We are loading an SSL page if (substr($url, 0, strlen(HTTP_SERVER)) == HTTP_SERVER) { // NONSSL url $url = HTTPS_SERVER . More >
