Recent posts about Drupal and WordPress
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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We Built the Internet Hall of Fame
April, 23 2012 CommentsWhile it's not quite the same as the honour of being inducted, we were pretty thrilled earlier this year when The Internet Society asked our team to build the online home of the Internet Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame site was built to honour some of our greatest heros, the people whose work has literally made our jobs possible like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee. Also in this year's round of inductees, Mitchell Baker, Open Source advocate and founding chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, and a woman we have much respect and admiration for here at Raised Eyebrow.
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Why we created a new Drupal distribution
April, 4 2012 CommentsSince we pushed the DataPublic distribution to Drupal.org a few weeks ago, a number people have asked the question, "Why did you not use the OpenPublic Drupal distribution as a base?".
There are many reasons we followed the path that we did. I hope to outline a few of them here:
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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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DataPublic - Our Drupal distribution for Open Data
March, 19 2012 CommentsOn Friday March 16th, in preparation for the 2012 Drupalcon in Denver, we launched a Beta version of a Drupal distribution called DataPublic on Drupal.org and GitHub. In conjunction with Microsoft, the distribution is the culmination of many months of work. It is the single largest codebase that we've worked on here at Raised Eyebrow and involved the development of over two dozen custom modules/features.
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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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Our Help Manual
November, 8 2011 CommentsThe lack of user documentation for open-source projects, like Wordpress and Drupal the two Content Management Systems we develop in most frequently at Raised Eyebrow, is a known issue. While a thriving user base and a good google search can often turn up answers to questions not addressed in documentation for a development team, that's not really a viable solution for end-users, in our case clients who are simply trying to maintain and manage their websites. And, since we build a lot of custom Drupal Modules or Wordpress Plugins to meet our client's specific communications needs, we then become the folks responsible for documentation.
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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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