Recent posts about Code and Coding
What we’re thinking about here at Raised Eyebrow these days. You can subscribe to our blog by RSS, or sign up for email updates.
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LocalTunnel
April, 25 2012 CommentsThis 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:
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Building the DataPublic DataSet Feature
March, 20 2012 CommentsWe 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.
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Using oEmbed to deliver video thumbnails in Drupal
February, 14 2012 CommentsWe've gone to great lengths over the past few years to create a smooth workflow for allowing clients to insert video on their Drupal sites. We're currently working on a Drupal distribution which needs a really straightforward way for embedding video, one that can be achieved by any type of user.
When we first meet with clients we give them two options for video:
- Upload a video file, and an image to use for a thumbnail in listings
- Use a third party service such as YouTube and upload a thumbnail image for listings
1. Upload a video file and a thumbnail image
There are many modules available to allow this to happen.
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Drupal 7 Geotagging and Silverlight Maps
December, 23 2011 CommentsRaised Eyebrow is currently working with Microsoft on a multi-faceted Drupal 7 project. One of the project's technical requirements involves displaying nodes that have been tagged with Geographical information on a Silverlight Map.
As part of the requirements gathering phase of the project we were given access to a recently built Drupal 6 site - http://bhangra.me, which features just such a Silverlight map on its homepage, to provide a base for how we would create similar functionality in Drupal 7. Our job has been to decipher how the map on bhangra.me functioned and then replicate that in Drupal 7.
The Easy (Silverlight) Part
I say easy, because it was the easy part for me. The Silverlight Control was developed externally and was cleverly built to accept and parse an XML/RSS feed from Drupal (or elsewhere). This RSS feed contained some simple Geographical information stored as so:
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Currency Formatting javascript library available on Github
December, 14 2011 CommentsIn addition to all of the small modules we write for client projects, we also write quite a few small javascript libraries. Several times now, we've had a need for good currency formatting in javascript. On the most recent occasion, rather than re-use previously-written code that might or might not be a good fit with the current project, we decided to write a small, flexible, general-purpose, javascript currency formatter--something like PHP's money_format() function (though with far fewer options).
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RE Help Module on github
October, 27 2011 Comments
We write a lot of small Drupal modules for client sites. Often these modules just do a single, small job that makes Drupal slightly easier or more convenient to use. One of the standard services we provide for Drupal clients is an online help manual containing general Drupal information, plus specific documentation about how to use the various custom features we build on clients' individual sites. Recently we realized that, though we always provide access to this manual, we could make it more convenient for clients to access by placing a link to it directly in clients own websites. This module was the result. -
RE Apache SOLR Extras module on Github
October, 25 2011 CommentsThis is another small Drupal module that was developed to satisfy a single requirement. In this case, the requirement was to allow the creation of Apache SOLR cores via the Drupal administration backend. We developed a site cloning tool for a client using the Aegir project, and each cloned site required its own individual Apache SOLR search, which in turn meant setting up an individual core for each individual site. Setting up individual cores can be a tricky process and this module provides a simple interface for creating the cores. The process of creating cores manually is documented on drupal.org. When you configuring Apache SOLR on your site, you usually visit - http://example.com/admin/settings/apachesolr configuration page, and enter the Apache SOLR path:
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RE Mailchimp Extras module on Github
October, 20 2011 CommentsThis is another small module that was developed to satisfy a single requirement. In this case, the requirement was to insert data from specific Webform fields (first name, last name, email address and email opt-in only) directly to the client's Mailchimp account. The module isn't a replacement for a full-featured Mailchimp-management module, but at the time it was initially developed, no other modules we were aware of could satisfy the customer's requirement.
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Build a slideshow with Context and RE Context Libraries
October, 18 2011 CommentsOur reason for writing the RE Context Libraries module (see the blog post for more info) was to fully utilize the power of the Context module when creating javascript-dependent features using the Features module. Confused? It's actually quite straightforward. Note that though this post is exclusively concerned with the Drupal 6 versions of the modules concerned, everything it discusses is also possible in Drupal 7.
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RE Context Libraries module available on drupal.org
October, 17 2011 CommentsThe RE Context Libraries module is the latest 'official' module released by Raised Eyebrow. This is a small module that builds upon the excellent Context module and has promises to be a real timesaver when theming new Drupal websites.
The Context module's great advantage over Drupal's native Blocks module is that it dramatically expands the set of conditions that can be used to determine where blocks can be displayed. This enables us to build Drupal sites where the behaviour of blocks is quite sophisticated--for example, we might decide to display a block containing a list of upcoming events on event nodes or on nodes with a certain taxonomy term. On a stock Drupal site, this would require custom coding.
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