09th Sep2011

Module to remove the address select from Ubercat Checkout

by admin

I was recently working on a website where the process required to have the address select drop-down fields not appear on the ubercart checkout page  so i wrote this small module.

I saw other people ask how to-do it, so here is your answer.

Remove Ubercart Address Select field
Remove Ubercart Address Select field

Please let mew know if it helped you. :)

11th May2011

From Joomla 1.0 to WordPress 3.1

by admin

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 site was loading very slow or not loading at all some times
  • Website flexibility was an issue
  • the person hired to maintain and to-do all the updates had a hard time working with very not intuitive Joomla

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):

  • The site had a few hundred articles (need an automatic importer)
  • The articles are to the most part text with some image in the middle (WordPress could do it)
  • Though the articles are broken down into categories the layout to display them is identical (Would be easier to replicate with Drupal, but does the client actually care about this or would he not care to have all of them look the same)

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.

  • Install a new wordpress 3.0 on a sub-domain ”New”
  • Install wordpress 2.3 on sub-domain ”temp”
  • upload the importer/migration script to “import” folder
  • create all the Post categories corresponding to the old site in the temporary wordpress install
  • run the import script to import the content one category at a time
  • Clean up (move the contents of “new” sub-domain to the main public_html/www folder, delete unnecessary temp sub-domain and import folder)
  • Enjoy the new site

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?

03rd Mar2011

Virtual Merchant – Ubercart/Drupal Integration

by admin

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

12th Mar2010

Couple of things I learned while creating sites in Drupal part 2

by admin

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:

  • CSS GZIP module – this module will gzip your aggregated css files
  • JavaScript Aggregator – minifies the JavaScript using JSMin
  • Boost provides static page caching for Drupal enabling a very significant performance and scalability boost for sites that receive mostly anonymous traffic

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.

04th Feb2010

Drupal Hacks – How to add a custom login box into your Drupal theme

by admin

Login BoxI just did a guest post on lichtman.ca please read it there.

10th Jan2010

From HTML Website to CMS with the same design powered by WordPress

by admin

Last week i had a task that i was really waiting to get one of these days. We had a client who has a basic informative website about a service they offer. The website was created a couple of years ago and they were very happy with design, but they wanted it to be a CMS. So that if they want to add another page they don’t have to manually create the page and add a link to it from the navigation menu on all other pages.

An obvious choice was WordPress since all they need is a 10 page website plus Blog, Drupal would be to big of an overkill for this scenario. Now, even though i already made more then 30 WordPress installs, i usually used either a free them and just made some small changes or even sometimes the client liked the theme so i didn’t even had to touch it.

I was looking for a blank WordPress theme that while having all the necessary elements would let me do the design. And while i am sure there are dozens of those here is one i used and was pretty happy with, its called WP Framework their own description says it in the best way possible:

A blank WordPress Theme Framework that’s everything you need, and nothing you don’t

And thats exactly what it was. All i had to do is break the existing HTML into parts as following:

  • header.php will hold parts of the HTML that never change from page to page on the top of the page
  • footer.php holds parts of the HTML that never change from page to page on the bottom of the page
  • sidebar.php has to have the HTML that will container that will be able to stretch based on the widgets activated in the back-end menu
  • and of course index.php thats where you include the header, footer and sidebar plus the container for the main part of the page your posts and pages.

Then i imported the CSS and 99% of the site was done. Feels great -I just created my first WordPress theme. Having done it i see first hand why there are so many nice and free WordPress themes, since you don’t have to be a coder to make one.

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