silas

I spent a bit of time helping somebody on freenode's #drupal-support IRC channel add teaser text to Ubercart's product grid view.

Here's an example of this from a site developed by left-click:
http://www.biolateral.com/catalog/biolateral-cds

It also includes audio, which also usually isn't in the grid display. I've removed that part from the code below to simplify things.

Awhile ago I posted a patch to add a checkbox to Ubercart to allow for this functionality. People seem to like it:
http://www.ubercart.org/contrib/5395

However, that patch modifies core Ubercart, which isn't ideal. Each time you upgrade Ubercart, you'll have to remember to reapply my patch. A better solution is to add a theme override to your theme's template.php file. This is a common practice in Drupal, so if you haven't done it before, now's a good time to learn. Just make sure you're ready to dig into a bit of php.

silas

Phew, we just got back from DrupalCon Paris, and we had a great time! More updates coming soon. But for now we have a couple announcements!

If you haven't heard, we're pretty excited about UberPOS, our new open source point-of-sales system for Drupal/Ubercart.

We'll be giving a demo tomorrow, September 8, in Amherst, MA and another one in NYC on September 16.

The UberPOS blog post announcing these presentations is here.

silas

The left-click web development team is heading to DrupalCon Paris and will be attending seminars and meeting up with some Drupal pros. Our planes take off in a few hours, and we'll be at the conference for a week.

Besides a visit to Versailles and maybe the Catacombs, I'll mostly be hanging out with Drupalers.

Dries Buytaert, Drupal's creator, will give a keynote speech on the state of Drupal, and then Angela "webchick" Byron, the Drupal 7 maintainer, will be giving some updates on where Drupal 7 is in terms of development and what steps need to be taken for it to be officially released.

silas

I'm not going to lie: I'm not quite looking forward to upgrading Left-click's Drupal site. But it has to be done, and Drupal makes it easier than a lot of other web development platforms.

Drupal is great software, but it just keeps getting better.

A lot of people aren't aware of the importance of upgrading. For complex sites and online shops, upgrading can take some time, but can also save money and time.

Briefly, some of the main benefits of upgrading Drupal and its modules include:
1. Bugfixes, speed improvements and new features
2. Improvements which will help your site's developers work faster and with greater ease
3. Security updates

In a little more detail:

silas

It's been a couple months since my last blog post! Wow. That means it's time for an update.

June and July have been very busy and exciting months here at Left-click, both for our Advanced Services (web and asterisk) team and our store technicians.

The store in Amherst continues to see a growing amount of business. That's great news and means we'll have to hire at least one more employee to help us out. Sadly, one of our junior techs, Sean, is leaving to live abroad. So, we'll also have to replace him, which won't be easy. We're now looking to hire a head technician and a junior technician. We need somebody who knows Windows inside out, but Linux and Mac knowledge is also a plus. We are also considering opening up a new store in a nearby town, so if you have skills and live in the Valley, don't hesitate to send in a resume.

silas

I finished reading “Cracking Drupal: A Drop in the Bucket” recently, which Alfred at the River Valley Tech Collective gave to me as a gift when I mentioned it looked interesting (thanks!).

The book is by Greg James Knaddison, or greggles. He's a well known member of the Drupal security team and, it turns out, a good writer when it comes to Drupal.

I would recommend this book for people who have dealt with some custom PHP code in Drupal and who don't know the ins and outs of (for example) functions like check_plain(), session_save_session() and the Drupal node access system.

The book has a lot going for it. It's compact (134 pages not counting appendixes), which is nice if your don't have a ton of time. More importantly, it puts Drupal security in perspective very well. For example, a choice quote is:

silas

More and more people are asking Left-click about how we can help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It makes sense. A large portion of your site visitors are going to get there by googling. Of course, you can't always be at the top for the most sought-after keywords, but with some work you can get closer.

Google offers a great starter guide. This blog post will supplement that by talking about how Drupal, which Left-click uses to build most of its sites, helps you meet Google's guidelines. If you're new to SEO, you should definitely read Google's guide as well as this Drupal SEO intro.

silas

If you didn't get enough partying in on Cinco De Mayo, don't fear: I'm establishing today, May 6, as "Don't Make your Site Internet Explorer 6 Compliant Day!"

Now, I understand making your own holiday is lame and bound to fail. But, whatever.

I also realize that all of you with important web sites can't celebrate this day too much. After all, there are a lot of Internet users still using IE6, and Left-click's site and our clients' sites look great in IE6. They still have to. But maybe everybody can celebrate in some small way for the remaining hours of this amazing day.

silas

I added an AddThis button to this site today (right above this line, it says 'share' on it), and, for the third time recently, I tested the Facebook sharing link and found that the wrong image popped up. Facebook grabbed the correct text this time, but, since that's been a problem for me in the past, I'll discuss how to solve that too (in short: use the meta tags module).

The solution to the image problem is pretty basic, but if you're a Drupal newbie you might find it a tad tricky.

silas

Horde is a great webmail program. It's easy to use, and, for somebody who has a lot of time to learn its configuration options and its PHP code inside out, it can be altered for many uses. However, it's poorly documented, and if you have a problem you'll probably search and find a dozen mailing list threads with half-articulated solutions.

By default, Horde allows you to login with your user name, but ISPConfig, which was being used to manage a server I was working on recently, adds somewhat hard to remember prefixes to user names. That avoids collisions in a multisite environment. But who wants to remember a prefix (which includes an arbitrary number in it). I needed Horde to convert the e-mail address a client typed to a user name that my IMAP daemon would understand.

I chose to solve this problems using 'hooks.'