Posts

thecorknews.ie wins Best Online Publication at the Irish Web Awards 2014

irish_web_awards_winner
We were very pleased to hear the thecorknews.ie won the ‘Best Online Publication’ award at the 2014 Irish Web Awards yesterday. Congratulations to The Cork News team!

We are especially proud as we helped Pride Design build the site some years ago. It was technically quite a challenging website to build but as always Drupal was up to the job!

Nasty Drupal 7 SQL injection vunerability

The register reported today about a nasty SQl injection vulnerability in Drupal 7 (in the Database abstraction API):

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/16/drupal_megavuln_sql_injection/

Better upgrade to 7.32!

Drupal 7 – Role can’t see unpublished posts, quick and dirty hack

If you want a particular role to see another’s unpublished posts in drupal, then the quickest (and possibility most dangerous) way of achieving this is to grant the role in question this permission:

bypass content access control

It sure aint pretty but it works, use at your own risk!

Drupal 7 – Use Checkboxes for Exposed Taxonomy Term filter in views

Drupa 7 Views renders exposed taxonomy term filters as either a select box / drop-down or an auto-complete. This may not be the best option especially if you allow the user to select multiple terms to filter with. So is there any way to render these filters as check-boxes instead? Well the bad news that you can’t by default, but the good news is that there is a module called Better Exposed Filters which allows you to do it easily!

 

To switch the filter to checkboxes, first install the module. Then make sure that your filters are exposed in block form – to do this open the ‘Advanced’ section in views and under ‘EXPOSED FORM’ set ‘Exposed form in block:’ to yes. Now change the ‘Exposed form style:’ setting to ‘Better Exposed Filters’ and then edit its settings by clicking on the ‘BEF Settings’ link.

 

drupal views exposed filter checkbox

 
 

In this screen find you taxonomy filter and in a select box like this ‘Display “tid” exposed filter as’ change the value to ‘Checkboxes/Radio Buttons’.

 

Now once you save your view the term filters should be rendered as check boxes!

 

drupal views taxonomy term exposed filter checkbox

 

Drupal 6 – Easy Social buttons not displaying in node

If you are using the easy social module in drupal 6 with a quirky (read rubbish) theme (or sometimes ubercart) then you may notice that the social media buttons don’t get displayed on some node types.

 

To get around this problem you may have to alter the node’s template to manually insert the Easy Social module’s output – and hence the social media buttons. Add the following to the relevant node template which can be found in your theme folder:

easy_social ;?>

More information can be found here.

 

PS It’s high time you were using drupal 7! ;-)

 

Drupal 7 – Filter form not displaying in Views Block Display

If you have a view that exports a filter form, you may find that the form is not displayed when the view is rendered in a block as a ‘block display’, even though it may display perfectly in a ‘page display’ as part of the same view.

 

This problem had me rather worried until I came across this post, simply changing the ‘Use AJAX’ view setting to ‘Yes’ seems to solve the problem (at least it did for me! ;-))

 

To change this setting, click on the ‘Advanced’ area in the view’s settings, and in the section called ‘OTHER’ you will see a setting called ‘Use AJAX’, change this to ‘Yes’ and hopefully your filter form will now display as part of your block view!

 

#Drupal 7 on #RaspberryPi

Class, just found this post that makes mention of Drupal 7 successfully hosted on a Raspberry PI!

 

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5199

 

Brilliant, it’s like chocolate and mint, my two favourite things brought together, I have have just found myself a new hobby!

 

Drupal 6 – strtotime() [function.strtotime]: It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings

Recently we came across this red/pink error message on an old(ish) Drupal 6 site that is running on shared hosting:

strtotime() [function.strtotime]: It is not safe to rely on
the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use
the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set()
... blah blah blah ...

It seems that this PHP warning is new to PHP 5.3 so we reckoned that the shared hosting must have upgraded their PHP to 5.3, anyway it turned out that adding the following line to the site’s php.ini file got rid of the red error message:

date.timezone = 'Europe/Dublin'

This explicitly sets the time zone to ‘Europe/Dublin’

 

Dries on Drupal 8

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!

 

New Cork Opera House Website Launched

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!