About: Amaravati is a collection of botanically based organic/vegan bath and body products. Each product is uniquely designed by founder Lise Lapierre, a homeopathic practitioner and certified Aromatherapist. Through the combination of carefully selected organic ingredients from around the world and utilizing 100% therapeutic grade essential oils, Amaravati is the beauty of divine wellness. Welcome to your age of skin enlightenment.
URL: http://amaravati.ca/
About: Dr. Arnie Gotfryd, Ph.D. is an observant Jew and an accomplished environmental scientist. His informative and inspiring presentations are peppered with personal anecdotes, new discoveries, and fresh insights into old-time religion.
I recently had a client who had an Joomla website with hundreds of posts. He had a couple of problems with his old website:
The client made a decision that its time to migrate site to some other CMS (content management system). The question became which would it be Drupal or WordPress. So we sat down and looked at his current site (whatever we were able to see, since part of the loading issue was the template we had to temporally switch to a different template). Here is a short list of stuff we looked at (and thoughts):
As you probably guessed we went for the WordPress in this case. We started looking for a migration/importer solution to bring over the old content, but we hit a roadblock, there was an importer from Joomla 1.5 to WordPress 3, (to make it work would need to update the joomla first) and there was one for Joomla 1.0 to wordpress 2.3 (to make this work will need to install an old version of wordpress import and then upgrade or export as wordress to wordpress). Since i wasn’t in the mood of updating an already broken Joomla site. I decided to use the second script Joomla to WordPress Import Wizard.
So here are the steps we took.
The whole process including theme customization took approximatively 15 Hours. And here is a link to the new website http://arniegotfryd.com. Any comments or questions?
I have recently had a client who already has a Drupal/Ubercart powered e-commerce website. The client though had an issue, the current payment processor only had an offsite processing for credit cards which meant that the client was using some percentage of potential customers because of an extra step in the checkout process.
We started looking for a new payment processor, and there are a few options we were looking at, Virtual Merchant was one of them. So we started looking if they are compatible with Ubercart. And to my surprise there was even no mention of either Drupal or Ubercart in the list of supported shopping carts.
So if you are (like we were not so long ago) looking if Virtual Merchant is compatible with Ubercart, serach no longer, you have found the answer, YES THEY ARE.
If you need help with integration Virtual Merchant or any other payment processor into a Drupal / Ubercart website, we certainly could help you.
P.S. here is the link to the Virtual Merchant Drupal module https://drupal.org/project/virtualmerchant
As i am continuing to create sites in Drupal i of course continue to learn of new Drupal ways to accomplish them and make them better. Sometimes even going back to sites of our previous clients and adding a module or two that i just found out existed, and think would benefit them.
On one of the sites i recently worked we bumped into a very puzzling problem the site looked and worked fine in (you guessed it) Firefox, Chrome and Safari but for some reason was totally messed up in Internet Explorer 7. Don’t get me wrong i am not surprised when i see a site having alignment problems in IE this is a known thing, but here it was as if it didn’t see half the CSS at all!
After hours and hours of trying to figure out and nail down the problem, checking the HTML for possibility of any unclosed tags and the like, removing a variety of JavaScript files and removing CSS stylesheets one by one (there were 32 of them). We were able to figure it out the HTML, JavaScript and CSS were all valid, the problem was that Internet Explorer reads maximum 30 CSS stylesheets, and since we had 32 of them, the last two were just ignored. Yes i know 30 stylesheets sounds like a lot but if you ever worked on a Drupal website you will know its not hard to get there: 5 default Drupal CSS files, another 5 from your theme plus every second module you add to your site like UberCart ads one or two of them you are at thirty already. Thats probably one of the reasons Drupal has “Optimize CSS files” option in the performance section of your Admin menu.
Once i started optimizing the site i found few more useful tools and modules to get you there. You probably already know what firebug is and used this popular add-on for Firefox, there is one more add-on that makes the optimization work much easier “Page Speed by Google”. They will show how well you page performs and give you optimization tips. Following the tips i found that there are some good Drupal modules that could help you follow the tips. For example:
Another useful tool for optimizing your page is CSS sprites. CSS sprite combines multiple background images into a single image. This technique makes web pages faster because it reduces the number of downloads per page. This step should be done at the design level, but it could be done later you will just spend little more time doing it.
If you liked this post you might want to read the first part.
Do you have any useful things you would want to share? Feel free to do so in the comments. Did you enjoy reading this post? Then share it by clicking the “share this post” button bellow.
I just did a guest post on lichtman.ca please read it there.
