Andy Sharples's blog

Easy Recipe for a photo gallery with a slideshow block

Posted Sun, 2010-07-11 21:17 by Andy Sharples

Background

You have an active online community (your scout troop or church) where members are taking photos at events. You want to collect those photos into various photo albums and also make them available in a block on your other pages. Here's a quick step-by-step recipe.

  1. Download, install, enable the modules you'll need: CCK, Views, FileField, ImageField, ImageAPI, ImageCache, Views Slideshow
  2. Create a "photo" content type. Rename the title field "caption". Add a field called "photo".

How much should a website cost?

Posted Sun, 2010-04-18 15:04 by Andy Sharples

I was about to write my own post on this subject when I found a great write-up at http://www.solosignal.com/how-much-should-web-site-design-development-an....

It's a couple years old, but only one thing has changed. The low-end hosting cost has gone from $15/month to $5/month. Other than that, it's a terrific article that helps potential clients understand why website design and development can seem a little pricey.

From "Brochureware" to "Communityware"

Posted Sat, 2010-04-17 19:12 by Andy Sharples

Companies, churches, clubs want their websites to be effective advertisement. The website has to look great. It has to be distinctive, so that the organization is seen as clever, creative, and interesting. We want visitors to be hooked.

That's “brochureware.” You can get a free brochureware website that looks OK. And for a few dollars a month, you can get a website that looks pretty good. What the free and cheap website providers don’t tell you is that successful brochureware depends on marketing savvy: great graphics and captivating writing.

rgrep

Posted Fri, 2009-07-10 13:09 by Andy Sharples

Here's a very helpful recursive grep commandline script I use on OSX and Linux all the time.

To use, just cd to the starting directory and type rgrep string. This will find all occurrences of "string" in the starting directory and any of its subdirectories.

Copy the code below and write it to a file called 'rgrep'. Make sure rgrep is somewhere in your path. (Maybe under ~/bin.)


#!/usr/bin/perl
$| = 1;
my ($str) = @ARGV;
if (!$str) {
die "Syntax: $0 {str} # finds {str} starting in current dir.\n";
}

Limiting number of characters allowed in a profile field

Posted Thu, 2009-05-28 23:41 by Andy Sharples

I finally solved the problem I'd been working on the last week or so: what's the Drupal way to limit the length of a profile field?

Problem: don't let users enter more than 4 characters into a field. (E.g., last four of your social, or last four of your passport, etc.)

Google wasn't too helpful. I only learned from Google that I wanted to set the maxlength attribute on the text input field:
<input type='text' maxlength='4'>

Why build websites using Drupal?

Posted Tue, 2009-02-24 17:59 by Andy Sharples

Drupal is a highly modular, open-source Content Management System (CMS) that enables communities of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on their own websites. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power community web portals, discussion sites, corporate web sites, intranet applications, and e-commerce applications.

High profile Drupal-based websites include:

Government:
Belgium, New Zealand, US www.recovery.gov
Education:
Harvard, Cornell, MIT, Sun Microsystems Learning Exchange

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