James Tombs

Blog posts

UK Geocoding and mapping in Drupal 7

Submitted by james on Tue, 08/05/2012 - 14:56

Geocoding UK addresses has always seemed to be a pain especially outside of Drupal. With Drupal 7 a few of the mapping/location modules that I have been used to using in Drupal 6 are either not available as a stable release or don't quite do what I wanted. A key example is Location which I have used on a Drupal 6 with which geocoding has never worked (I still don't know if it is something that should work out the box, it certainly seems to imply to me.)

A rash of new Drupal 7 modules has made the process a lot easier though.

Anchor CMSs custom CSS and javascript comes to Drupal through Code per Node

Submitted by james on Thu, 03/05/2012 - 13:16

Anchor CMS is getting more attention as of late with one of its key features being able to add custom javascript and CSS per blog post. This allows a lot of custom design to take place which differs per page. An example of this can be found on the creators blog.

Drupal is lacking this feature, but as is the way with Drupal, "there's a module for that". Code per Node does this and more allowing you to add custom CSS and javascript to both blocks and content types as a whole rather than individual nodes.

Drupal 8 dev thoughts

Submitted by james on Tue, 01/05/2012 - 15:02

Having just installed the Drupal 8 development version on to a local test site, it has raised a few thoughts.

Of course a lot of these could be fixed or the majority may disagree but either way. We have a long time before Drupal 8 will be shipping and as such have a lot of time to sort out any problems.

"Cannot redeclare class themeregistry" when trying install Drupal 7

Submitted by james on Wed, 08/02/2012 - 10:37

When attempting to install Drupal 7 on a server which has a few Drupal 6 installs running without a problem I got a white screen of death after selecting the profile I want to use.

Looking in the log file were quite a few lines stating:

[Wed Feb 08 10:19:55 2012] [error] [client 78.86.177.75] PHP Fatal error: require() [function.require'>function.require]: Cannot redeclare class themeregistry in /var/www/microsites/www/includes/install.inc on line 1120

The problem turned out to be an issue with an APC configuration.

Upgrade to Drupal 7

Submitted by james on Thu, 02/02/2012 - 22:09

I have finally got around to upgrading the old site to Drupal 7.

Site is very simple just using a basic view for the blog listing (which I could of just used the standard river of news, but it's nice to know that I can control it whenever I want).

The upgrade process was very simple, there were a couple of issues with modules not working properly mainly due to PHP 5.3 errors but they were easy to overcome or I just got rid of the module as it wasn't really needed.

Adding color module support to your theme in Drupal 7

Submitted by james on Wed, 09/11/2011 - 15:33

I have been playing about with creating my own base theme which I can use to easily roll out new sites quickly and easily for those who don't want to pay for a bespoke design.

The main problem with this is ending up with one theme for all, to get around this with out having to do any development work is use Drupal's core colour module which allows the user to select the colours of certain areas.

This will just show you the basic code that is required for use with a theme using the PHPTempalte engine with some comments on what the code is doing at parts.

Sorry but I will be using the English spelling, too used to typing with the 'u'.

Creating custom pane styles in Drupal 6

Submitted by james on Fri, 04/11/2011 - 12:25

In Panels you can change the style of panes very easily using some presets from the Panels module.

panels-2.jpg

This tutorial will show you how to define your own styles as well as add a settings form to it so you can allow users to further configure the styling of the pane.

panels-3.jpg

Creating your own personal bookmark site like Delicious in Drupal 7

Submitted by james on Tue, 27/09/2011 - 08:49

This guide will show you how to make a bookmarking site similar to Delicious where you can add a URL with an optional description and tags which can then be searched on using the internal search or browse using tags.

Creating a comma separated list of taxonomy terms for a node

Submitted by james on Sat, 03/09/2011 - 19:23

The following code snippet will provide a comma separated list of taxonomy terms for a given node.

New website to sell your house through from just £395 rather than 1.5%

Submitted by james on Mon, 22/08/2011 - 15:19

A new way to sell your house has just come up called Ownmove.com.

They provide the same service as any other high street agent but only charge a small, one-off flat fee of £395 +VAT rather than 1.5% of the sale price which based on the average house price in the UK of £170,000 is over £2,000!!