Here is an interesting article about Dries’ vision for Drupal 8:

http://www.cio.com.au/article/411440/dries_vision_drupal_8/

I like the focus on the editorial experience to help people mange content on-line, drupal is great CMS but it can sometimes be quite difficult for non webbies & techies to effectively manage the content on their drupal websites – in fact this really could have been given more attention in d7 (oh well)!

What is also interesting is the recognition that drupal has become more of a web platform than just a CMS alone – that’s how we use it!

The Cork Opera House has recently launched its brand-spanking-new website – www.corkoperahouse.ie

It was designed and developed by our web design partners at Pride Design in Cork, we had a great time helping them to build this website which contains loads of multi-media content with facebook and twitter integration. Once again we worked closely with pride on the development of this fully content managed website which was (as always) site built with drupal.

So if you are in Cork for the weekend and fancy a good show, why not have a browse over the site and see if anything catches your eye!

Our favourite Content Management System – Drupal is moving over from CVS to Git today, meanwhile drupal.org will be down for 12 hours…

More and more people seem to be completely side-stepping subversion and moving straight to Git, is subversion yesterday’s news?

I do like subversion and think it’s an excellent Software Version Control system, but I do feel that Git may be stealing the march on it…

Any thoughts?

Software Developers know their away around SQL – it is a tool of the trade (as it were!), however today I had to revert to google to find the SQL to swap the values of 2 columns within a table. Luckily I found this interesting (and very handy) article that explains just how to do it:

http://beerpla.net/2009/02/17/swapping-column-values-in-mysql/

I had to reverse the relationships between drupal taxonomy terms, this was to be done by reversing the values of the tid1 and tid2 columns of the term_relation table, this code did the trick for me:

If I had to manually reverse all of the taxonomy relationships via the drupal admin interface it would have taken _forever_!

PS. If, for a given taxonomy term id, you need to get a list of the related taxonomy terms, just call:

although be warned that the concept of related terms is to be removed in drupal 7!

Our favourite foody-friends, Cully and Sully have recently launched Chef Factor – a cookery competition for all of you budding Chefs out there. The top prize is 12 week cookery course in Ballymaloe worth €12,000! For more details see the Chef Factor site:

http://www.cheffactor.ie/

We had great fun helping our web design partners Pride Design to develop and launch the Chef Factor site which as usual we developed using drupal, the site called for plenty of Facebook interconnection via Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol!

So if you’re up for a culinary challenge why not don your apron and get cheffing!

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!