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!

Software development can sometimes be a comical affair, I have just been caught out badly by a strange gotcha - it appeared that #pragma once stopped working on a Visual Studio C++ project on which I have been working.  I was getting plenty of error messages about redefined classes! 

Well it turns out that I had left a copy of one of my header files lying around in one of the project folders.  As pragma once uses a header file’s full path to figure out if it has already opened it, a situation arose whereby both files were included and compile errors flooded in (despite the pragma onces)!

Well removing the (accidential) copy of the header file fixed the problem - boy do I feel stupid, I hope this post may help someone with a similar problem in the future!

I ran into a problem the other day with .NET’s Convert.ToDecimal() , it turns out that it doesn’t handle scientific Notation! Pass it something like “8E-5″ and the poor thing just throws an exception…

The software in which the problem surfaced was developed as a web application that must deal with numbers read from an Excel chart and so the formats encountered are many and varied!

This post points out that you can use this instead:

But just to be safe I am now using:

And it does work for Exponents, hopefully along with everything else!

I have been developing a web application for one of our clients using drupal, it’s a dashboard type data visualisation system that consumes and displays data over an intranet from their software systems.  I have been using google charts with great success.

The Chart API module for drupal is very nice, it lets you quite easily incorporate google charts into your web site or application without having to get into the details of the google chart API itself, and the charts themselves look great - just the kind of thing to cheer up a busy software developer.  However it deosn’t seem to support Radar or Polar charts.  There is no mention of them in the documentation, no example on the examples page.  There is also no symbol such as ‘CHART_TYPE_RADAR’ defined in the module as there is for the other chart types, for example ‘CHART_TYPE_LINE’ defined for line charts.

So is it possible to plot radar charts using the Chart API module?  I consulted the google chart api and found that the radar chart type is donated as ‘r’, so I tried creating a simple chart and just set it’s type to ‘r’ (rather than say CHART_TYPE_LINE) and it worked just fine!

$chart = array(
‘#chart_id’ => ’sink_radar’,
‘#title’ => chart_title(t(’Failures by Sink’), ‘001334′, 15),
‘#type’ => ‘r’,
‘#size’ => chart_size(400, 240),
);

$chart['#data'][] = array(20, 30, 15, 70, 90, 20);

$chart['#mixed_axis_labels'][CHART_AXIS_X_BOTTOM][1][] =
                      chart_mixed_axis_label(’sink1′);
$chart['#mixed_axis_labels'][CHART_AXIS_X_BOTTOM][1][] =
                      chart_mixed_axis_label(’sink2′);
$chart['#mixed_axis_labels'][CHART_AXIS_X_BOTTOM][1][] =
                      chart_mixed_axis_label(’sink3′);
$chart['#mixed_axis_labels'][CHART_AXIS_X_BOTTOM][1][] =
                      chart_mixed_axis_label(’sink4′);
$chart['#mixed_axis_labels'][CHART_AXIS_X_BOTTOM][1][] =
                      chart_mixed_axis_label(’sink5′);
$chart['#mixed_axis_labels'][CHART_AXIS_X_BOTTOM][1][] =
                      chart_mixed_axis_label(’sink6′);

echo chart_render($chart);

 This code yileds a chart like this:

I ran into a funny problem recently with Ridge’s debian fileserver - I connected a second external USB drive to it and it stopped working! It always had one external USB drive connected, this was mapped to /dev/sda1 and auto-mounted in /etc/fstab along the lines of:

Everything was running nicely until I introduced a second usb device, this time a large flash disk onto which our automatic backup script is going to periodically dump an encrypted tarball (to provide an easy way for us to move encrypted backups off-site.)

Anyway, I saw that the second disk was mapped to /dev/sdb1 and I optimistically modified /etc/fstab to cater for the new flash disk along the lines of:

So far so good, after reboot both file systems successfully mounted. But after the next reboot things were not as expected, the original disk was mounted onto the new ‘flash’ mount point and the FAT flash disk was not mounted at all!

With the second USB disk connected the way in which the disks were mapped to Linux devices would change randomly every time the system was rebooted - sometimes a disk would appear as /dev/sda1 and sometimes as /dev/sdb1.  As you can imagine this completely ruined the file system setup as configured in /etc/fstab!!

I had never encountered this before, but after a little research I found a work around - this involved mounting the disks by label rather than by the more traditional device name.

All labelled disks/volumes can be found in /dev/disk/by-label/ , these labels are static and can be used to mount their volumes (instead of using the non-static /dev/sda1 etc.).  Only labelled device appear in the by-label directory, so if you don’t see a disk you may have to give it a label using the tune2fs command. I had to give my original USB disk’s volume a label, I determined that it was currently mapped to /dev/sdb1 and issued the following command to label it as ‘external’:

Now with both disks labelled I modified /etc/fstab as follows:

And thankfully that fixed the problem! - with the IT systems purring along I can get back to the many more mundane aspects of running a software development consultancy…

Here’s an interesting thing, the Register reports that the whitehouse has moved its website over to drupal - http://www.whitehouse.gov/

It’s a fairly pedestrian website but it’s good to see that the fledgling administration know their web technology!