Category: Development

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Development

Google Visualization Pie Chart

Haven’t played around with the Google Visualization API in a little bit, so I was quite pleasantly surprised to learn of some very nice new features and improved documentation since my last encounter. Mind you, it was very impressive to me 18 or so months ago, but now has gotten better in so many ways.

First off,  the getting started examples are great and can get anyone with basic web skills making static or interactive charts in no time. The Code Playground is also very useful to play around with, making changes and seeing the result on the fly is very convenient.

The new pie chart is great. It’s improved appearance and tool tips are very welcomed. It has a much more polished look to them.

Here’s an example I threw together in just a few minutes.

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Development

Drupal 7 hide taxonomy

Drupal 7 Manage DisplayI’ve just begun upgrading a Drupal 6 custom theme to Drupal 7. And after a couple of attempts at cleaning up my theme (ok, numerous attempts), things started to render correctly.

However, I did notice that the taxonomy terms that I had removed from node.tpl.php in my Drupal 6 theme were now appearing in 7. After some investigation, I did notice that while logged in as admin, under Structure > Content Types > then manage display for the respective content type you could make certain Fields hidden.

While it took me a little bit of adjustment to find at first, this is great. I just set the Label and Format to field I didn’t want to display on my Page to <hidden> and all is well again.

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Development

Make CKEditor match your site’s CSS in Drupal 6

I’ve been converting a pretty big site over to Drupal 6 recently and have been trying to get the CKEditor to very closely appear like the sites CSS styles. By default it was doing an ok job, but not good enough for how the site’s content managers would be working with it.

Through a bit of research I did find an excellent tutorial on the subject. This was a tremendous help and exactly what I was looking to do.

Just a few simple adjustments in the ckeditor.config.js was all it took.

First I just changed the value of:

config.bodyId = '';

Now the majority of my site’s styles were cascading onto the CKEditor. There were still some minor tweaking that needed to be done.

Adding a few lines using:

config.extraCss += "";

and I was all set. Now the CKEditor editor is displaying content almost identically than how it will actually appear on the site.

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Development

Upgraded from YUI2 to YUI3

I finally got around to upgraded this blog from YUI2 to YUI3. The site doesn’t feature too much scripting so, switching over was extremely easy.

First I converted the Grid layout of the site. The YUI3 CSS Grid was very simple to switch to, and made sense fairly quickly. I’ve been using YUI2 Grids for a while, so initially the changes in YUI3 seemed a bit foreign, but the differences did sink in and I’ve found it to be a more flexible grid to work with. A grid builder like the one offered for YUI2 would be a very welcome addition.

I’m also making use of YUI3 Tabview. Again, I was using a very basic example of it so switching over was a breeze. Actually just had to remove a little markup.

I really do like the new approach in YUI3. It’s well worth the investment of taking a few minutes of reading through the documentation. The flexibility and potential there for growth is great. Very good stuff.

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Development

YQL Query Builder

YQLOne of my favorite web services, YQL is now even easier to use. They’ve recently added a Query Builder to the YQL console, so now it’s so much easier to figure out which keys are available in tables.

Previously I found I had to dig deep into an XML file, and use a lot of trial and error to figure out what keys were available, but he Query Builder now handles the majority of that for me. It also exposes the metadata in a friendly visual format, which is another great thing too.

Sub-queries aren’t supported yet, but hopefully that’s something that they might be able to add in the not too distant future.

All the details are mentioned on their blog with a nice screencast going over how to use it.

All in all a very impressive improvement to an already great service.

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Development

Indulge in Avalon mobile website

I’ve been working on a mobile website for the great folks at Indulge in Avalon. A few months back we had just launched a site for them powered by Joomla!, and since we had a solid foundation built it really made a mobile version much easier to develop.

The first step was figuring out what type of mobile experience to offer. Google Analytics really helped us out here. We were able to get a good idea of what type of mobile devices have been visiting the site, browser types, etc. – amazing info! Due to visitor information and features needed, we decided to go with a mobile website vs developing a mobile application(s) at this time.

Next was simplifying the experience for the mobile user. This site primary features local businesses of Avalon, so we wanted to really focus on that and make it as easy as possible for a mobile user to navigate. A simple iOS like list navigation really worked well for the data we were delivering. A user could easily drill down for details and back up again.

Then we worked of speed, speed and speed. The mobile website makes use of no images in it’s interface, it’s all CSS driven and if you have a really spiffy device takes advantage of gradients and rounded corners, etc. If you don’t have a super new device, it’s still attractive and fully functional. Minimal use of http requests and minified code is used as well to squeeze every little byte out of the site. All this savings really makes for a fast site, even on slower connections.

All in all this has been a very great experience. The clients being so easy and understanding to work with really help in making this work as well as it does. They know what they want, deliver their parts and are open to my suggestions on the areas of expertise. There’s still some minor areas to finish up and optimize even further, but please feel free to check out the mobile site by either visiting www.indulgeinavalon.com in  your mobile device or you can access the mobile site directly at m.indulgeinavalon.com