Software Engineering can be a bit challenging on the Google App Engine, and so I am always on the lookout for a helping hand!  I came across this article on using reCaptcha on the Google App Engine using python:

http://daily.profeth.de/2008/04/using-recaptcha-with-google-app-engine.html

Just what I needed, a step by step guide!

Here is an interesting post about the 5 most interesting new features in wordpress 3.0: http://mashable.com/2010/05/10/new-features-wordpress-3/

It certainly seems to be going in the right direction - I will be interested to see what can be done with the new custom content types.  This could lead to the use of wordpress for the development of richer websitse and web applications.

Now if they would only fix up what has to be the world’s most frustrating WYSWYG editor! Mind you I haven’t yet come across a web WYSWYG yet that could be described as complete.

In this gloomy climate it’s great to see some good news - and the Irish Times reports here that Google has seen a sharp rise in its profits for the first quarter of this year - more evidence they say that the web advertising and technology sectors are bouncing back from the recession. It seems that revenue rose 28% which is the the biggest rate of growth since the third quarter of 2008.

 
Good news indeed for Google’s many Irish employees, and good news also for the online industry if this trend continues - it certainly seems that ‘online’ is where we all need to be as there aint much moving and shaking in the traditional marketing arena!

There are some interesting aspects to doing Software Enginering from within the Google App Engine sandbox - I came across this interesting article on how to play with things so that you can make XML-RPC calls from within the google app engine sandbox.  By default such calls will be blocked but the article shows who to provide your own ‘Transport’ object to break out of the sandbox.


http://brizzled.clapper.org/id/80


I haven’t tried the technique yet as there are a few changes to make but I hope to try it soon and report back!


In the mean time if anybody has tried the technique please let us know how you got on!

Just came across a bit of a time-waster in the PHP SimpleXMLElement lib.  Usually if you’re accessing an element called, say ‘username’ you use the follwoing syntax:

However if the element has a minus sign in its name, like ‘user-name’ you have to use the following syntax instead:

If you use the original syntax no data will be returned, mad stuff, I would have wasted much more time on this if it wasn’t for this post - Thanks for the dig-out!

Our web design partners at Pride Design have put Paula Rowan’s new website  www.glovesbypaularowan.ie live, I worked very closely with Shane at Pride Design to bring the site to fruition and I am very happy with the outcome!  Paula sells a (self designed) range of luxury gloves through her new website.

The website is (once again) built on Drupal 6 with the eCommerece functionality provided by ubercart.  Ubercart worked out very well on this project and it is quickly becoming our preferred eCommerce solution as it provides modern and flexible shopping cart functionality along with the power of drupal.

Anyway, if you’re feeling a bit on thee chilly side on this dark and cold month of December why not pop over to www.glovesbypaularowan.ie  and see if a luxury pair of leather gloves can help!

Q: Is it possible to use the ubercart Option Images module (uc_option_image) with a custom product display template, via Content Template (contemplate) or a custom node.tpl.php?

A: Yes, you just need to manually call the attribute image into your template with a line of PHP code.

The ubercart Option Images module (uc_option_image) is a really nice module that allows you to provide an alternative image for product attribute options - when the visitor views a product and chooses an attribute option (say colour: Red) the attribute displayed image will change to the one for that option - very nice especially for online shops that sell, say clothes in different colours and patterns etc. 

The strange thing is that (at the time of writing) the Option Images 6.x-1.4 doesn’t work and doesn’t even install!  Luckily some good folks have worked around the problems and come up with a fixed version that does work (with a bit of TLC) - I have written an article about  getting option images to work with the patched version on the Pride Design website  here –>

http://www.pridedesign.ie/content/ubercart-option-images-installs

This should hopefully help you to get it up and running…

Now, by default this module only attaches the option image to the default ubercart product display, if you are using a custom product template (as I always do) via the Content Template (contemplate) module or via a custom node.tpl.php file then the option images will not be displayed. 

To get around this you just have to pop a bit of PHP code into you template at the point at which you want the image to display as follows:

�

This should do the trick.  If you want only the attribute option image to be displayed (i.e. instead of the product image) then just replace your current product image display code with this.

Today our partners at Pride Design in Cork put the new Gael-Taca  (http://www.gael-taca.com/) website live, once again we worked closely with pride on its development.  It is fully content managed site built on drupal 6, but the really interesting thing about it is that it’s multi-lingual - as Gaeilge agus as Bearla! (in Irish and English).

In general Drupal proved itself to be well up to the job of multilingual website development, there were just a few strange things to look out for along the way.  One thing I would say though is don’t attempt multi-lingual development without first installing the drupal Internationalization (i18n) module, it is a must!

Good news, this just out on the wire - Drupal has won ‘Best open source PHP Content Management System‘ for the second year running!  Congrats to our favourite CMS and thanks to all the many who volunteered their time to make it so great!

The new Flame By Design (http://www.flamebydesign.ie) website has gone live.  We worked closely with Sinead at Pride Design to get it up and running.  It is another classic content managed drupal 6 website - setup so that the client can easily add and manage the product line up and associated data via a set of specially tailored administration menus.

We used the Dynamic Display Block module (ddblock) to present the alternating images on the home page and great use was made of drupal’s taxonomy system to organise and categorise the products. 

We wish Flame by Design all the best with their new website!