Recent posts about Code and Coding

Date handling differences between PHP versions

As part of an assignment in a Drupal course that I'm giving a UBC this fall, I asked the students to develop a small module that would create a block and output how many days there were until Christmas. This is a relatively simple task as it involves two Drupal hooks and a little bit of date manipulation.

As the students worked on the module it became clear to me that there were two ways in which to handle the date calculation part, that is it could be written in PHP version > 5.2 or in PHP version < 5.2.

DateTime class in PHP 5.2

PHP 5.2 introduced the DateTime class and with it an number of Date manipulation methods.

Design Patterns Updated for Foundation 3

It's no secret that we love Zurb's Foundation here at Raised Eyebrow and version 3 has brought with it all kinds of amazing goodies that make theming and prototyping a breeze. 

In a previous post I described some responsive design patterns that can help you think about layouts on various device sizes. These patterns have now been updated to use Foundation3 as well as some neat little updates to make things pretty and show you how it all works. 

You can see the updated design patterns here.

Nice taxonomy term separators in Drupal 7

Have you ever wanted to add a separator like a comma ',' between the output of taxonomy terms?

When you output a list of terms in a view on Drupal you get something like this:

Topics: Drupal WordPress Development Design Process

So what do you think the topics are? "WordPress Development" "Design Process", or is it "WordPress", "Development", "Design Process"? You can see where I'm going with this. Wouldn't it be nice to add a separator of any kind to make this easier to read? I created a module that adds a Display handler to the Term reference field that allows the output of a separator. It also allows the addition of a separator at the end in the event that you want to separate multiple vocabularies.

LocalTunnel

This is a post in a series about some new tools we've been folding into our workflow here at Raised Eyebrow. 

I'll give you a scenario: You've got a client who needs a change NOW but wants to vet the change before it goes live.

You could fumble around with a middle-man external sandbox server or send them a screenshot but chances are you've probably got their site running on MAMP or XAMPP or just plain Apache on your machine. It would be totally simple to make the change on your own box and then you wouldn't need to trip around FTP and SSH trying to get it somewhere they can see it.

Enter LocalTunnel, a ruby script and service that can expose a single port on your machine to the outside world temporarily. 

I wrote a blog post on my site about the experience and the particulars of setting it up but the way it works is simple:

Building the DataPublic DataSet Feature

We recently launched a Drupal distro called DataPublic. I mentioned in the announcement blog post that it was probably the largest codebase we had worked on at Raised Eyebrow, and that's accurate. The number of custom modules, contrib modules and themes used was definitely up there with some of the largest sites we've built for clients.