JoeDag32

Finished up one of the cooler projects I’ve had the pleasure to work on a few weeks ago. The site is www.visitavalonnj.com.

I’ve worked with the client in the past and they were looking for a new site to help with the tourism of Avalon, NJ (a very nice place). Working with them is excellent and probably the best overall client relationship I’ve had to date. They know what that want, and present a professional design/concept and I build them a web solution to meet their needs.

In this case they really wanted a site that would be easy for them to maintain and add and edit content on a regular basis. Oh yeah, and they also needed it done before the start of their tourism season (middle of March ideally).

With only a few seconds into the conversation I knew that Drupal would be the perfect match for their needs.

Some modules featured in the creation of this project were:

• Views – while I use it in every Drupal site I’ve ever worked on, it was heavily used in this project and really helped cut down on development time.
• Calendar and Date – they needed an events calendar and the Calendar module was great to build upon. They also used dates with other content types and the Date module was a real life saver in these cases too.
• Media – the client wanted the ability to add images inline view a wysiwyg editor. While still not a perfect solution, the Media module did help us give the client such a ability.
• Facebook OAuth – they wanted users to have the option to login with their Facebook account instead of having to create a separate account for their site. This module was simple to set up and got the job done.
• Google weather – this allowed us to easily bring in and display the latest weather in Avalon without too much hassle. Just some minor CSS tweaking was involved to get it done.
• Social media – a very new module and it’s release was most timely. An excellent way to bring the now common social media button onto a website.
• Webform – again a well known staple that just gets the job done.
• Omega Theme – a real lifesaver for building a responsive web design. I highly recommend it as a starter theme for any new site.

The whole building block structure of Drupal really allowed us to deliver some cutting edge features without having to start from scratch. This really saved us a great deal in time and costs ($$$) and allowed me to concentrate more of the really unique aspects of the site.

Most impressive was how well the client has been able to use Drupal to manage the site. Our training simply consisted of a few minutes on a phone call. The admin interface was very intuitive to them and I did make sure to label all content types and fields so that each part was clear to them when it came time for them to manage the site.

Again, this was a pretty impressive project and and absolute treat to work with them again! I’m very impressed with it’s outcome and am very excited to check back with it’s performance in a few months.

Lots of fun.

A few months ago one of my co-workers, the Admiral told me that her mom’s church was having issues updating their website: http://christchurchsomerspoint.org. Apparently the guy who developed and was assisting them with their site had gotten busy and was no longer able to support them in a timely manner. She asked if I’d be interested in working with them, and I said sure, why not.

My contact Mark came from a tech background. This really made explaining options a breeze and he had a very realistic expectation of what could be expected. He wanted to stick with the current site design and navigation with incorporating a modern CMS (content management system) so that they could manage the site’s content on their own.

After a short meeting and review, it became pretty apparent that Drupal would be a perfect fit for their CMS needs. I gave him a quick Drupal demo and he agreed as well. He was actually very much impressed and excited with what Drupal would offer them out of the box.

I also suggested that they try out Dreamhost for their hosting needs. Dreamhost offers free hosting for non-profits, and free is very hard to beat. I wasn’t sure if the free shared hosting plan would be good enough to support a Drupal site, but thus far it’s been great and looks to be a perfect fit for them.

The majority of their content needs were rather basic, but they did want the ability to upload and share mp3′s of their weekly sermons. Thankfully there were some great modules available that we were able to build upon.

Here’s a list of the modules used by their site:

• audiofield
• calendar
• ctools
• date
• entity
• file_entity
• libraries
• media
• pathauto
• token
• views
• views_slideshow
• webform
• wysiwyg

As you can see most are the standard site modules, but the audiofield was a new one to me and really solved the issue of uploading and playing mp3 files. It worked great.

I built the site on the Zen theme, which really made things easy to get started. Just chunked up their existing site into regions and blocks and styled things up from there.

After meeting with them to train them on using Drupal to manage their site, they were extremely pleased and enthusiastic to get started. It really felt great to know that I was able to deliver such and excellent solution for them at a very affordable price. I’m really glad I took on this project and can’t wait to see how well they do keeping content up to date.

I was working on a project where PayPal Buy Now buttons were being generated by a widget and not allowing the quantity option to be used when a user was making a purchase. PayPal’s button generator does easily allow for quantities to be enabled with simple click, but this wasn’t an option for me in this case.

It was fairly difficult finding the tag to add to enable quantity on checkout, so I figured I’d share in case someone else ran into the same issue. Official documentation was eventually found.

It’s a very basic input that must be included with the form:

<input type="hidden" name="undefined_quantity" value="1">

<input type=”hidden” name=”undefined_quantity” value=”1″>

That’s all, just include that with the form and you’re all set.

After figuring this one out, it’s really easy to do but I did have a hard time since I didn’t bother to check and see if a specific function already existed to do this behavior.

I wanted to display all the child pages of a Page as an unordered list. I initially tried using the WP_Query function to make this work. I tried creating a loop and feeding it some parameters, but kept getting no results.

Upon some further searching I did come across the wp_list_pages() function. I’m not sure why I didn’t begin with this, but for some reason I was set on using WP_Query.

There’s a ton of parameters and some great examples found on the wp_list_pages() page.

Here’s the little bit of code I added to a template to output the child pages as a list. Notice that the parent page’s id is the 32 that you will see as a parameter below. Enter whatever your parent page’s id is in it’s place.

wp_list_pages('sort_column=menu_order&title_li=&child_of=32');

Doesn’t really get much easier that that.

I was dealing with a very bizarre draft issue with Adobe Contribute CS5, that we finally solved after much head scratching.

A Draft was showing up for only 1 user that a Draft that she had sent to me to publish was still being reviewed by me. This wasn’t the case, however no matter how many times we tried to remove the .LCK file or edit the page again etc. it was still telling her that I was still reviewing it. So she could no longer edit that page, yet any other user could.

We deleted traces of the draft on the server then her local machine. However, her Contribute would recreate the draft status. So after much work, we finally went to her Draft Console and right mouse clicked on the Draft and viewed properties.

Up opened a wonderful little video stating the drafts filename (it’s a pretty crazy random string) as well as the URL path to where this phantom Draft existed on the server.

Once we had this path, we were able to delete the remnants of this Draft from the server and all is well again. Damn you Contribute, damn you to hell.

This is so easy now that I know how to do it, but I didn’t realize that fields could be themed similar to nodes.

Just create a template file titled:

field–[field_name].tpl.php

and save it in your theme’s directory:

/sites/all/themes/[your_theme]/

You can get the field name on the Content Type screen, Structure > Content types > [your_content_type]

Then you just enter your markup in the field–[field_name].tpl.php file that you’ve created.

You can use the field.tpl.php file located in /modules/field/theme/field.tpl.php as a starting point.