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One form, many uses - server side jQuery with Jaxer

I'm sure many of you have had to do 'corporate reviews' at work. You know, you get given a form and are asked to grade yourself on various aspects of your job. You fill in your parts of the form and then give it to your employer who fills in the rest. After doing so, he probably photocopies it, gives back to you for reflection, and then proceeds to make some private notes on his copy.

Vertically and horizontally center a div using CSS

As a web designer, I'm often asked to center content on a web page, vertically as well as horizontally. This is often referred to as 'the letterbox effect'. Back in the day, when we all used tables to mark up our pages, this was a pretty simple task.

Drupal 6 - How to embed a region in a node

There will come a time when you'll want to add a new region to your Drupal theme, weather you are using a stock theme, a modification of a base theme such as Zen (like me) or creating your own theme from scratch.

Drupal 6 makes the creation of new regions as simple as adding one line of code to your themes template.php file. However, by default new regions created in this manor will only be available to your themes page template (page.tpl.php) and a little extra work will be needed if you want to display it somewhere else.

Drupal 6 media streaming with Dash Media Player

Several weeks ago I took a fairly in-depth look at the current video streaming options available for Drupal 6. Shortly after I published the article, a new product entered the market - Dash Media Player. Dash Player is the creation of Travis Tidwell from TMT Digital, also the developer of the FlashVideo module for Drupal.

CSS shadows - A drop shadow roundup

I've come across loads of different techniques to create a browser based drop shadow effect. Some use only CSS whilst others need the help of JavaScript, some are cross browser friendly, others are not!

Drupal 6 video streaming roundup

In this article I'm going to take a look at video streaming options for Drupal 6, from the point of view of setting up a user generated content video website. What provisions does Drupal 6 have for handling video content?

Nginx proxy to Apache - access remote host IP address using mod_praf

These days it i getting more and more common for people to use a lightweight webserver such as lighttpd or nginx as a frontend, and proxy to an Apache backend if they really need to.

How to customise the search box in Drupal 6

By default, Drupal allows you to include a search box directly into your theme. In most themes, when enabled, this search box will show up in the primary navigation bar as an input box labeled "Search this site", with a submit button labeled "Search". But what if you want to alter or completely hide these labels, or even add a new class to the input box?

Running server side processes via JavaScript with Jaxer

Last week I wrote a short introductory article about Aptana's Jaxer. Today I want to follow on from there and introduce one of the new features that has been added in Jaxer 1.0.

5 Drupal SEO modules - essential modules for all sites

Out of the box, Drupal SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is pretty good. But there's definitely extra work that you can do to make it even better. In this short article I want to focus on a selection of Drupal SEO modules which provide fundamental enhancements that I think should be included in the Drupal core itself some day.

Mirror an svn repository with svnsync

If you like to keep all your work under svn source control, you're probably going to also want to keep a backup of your svn repositories in case of a hardware failure or some other catastrophic event. svn comes with a utility to help you do this - svnsync, which we can use to keep a real-time, read only backup of our svn repositories.

Drupal + Nginx + Fastcgi - setup and configuration

A Drupal site with several extra modules installed can leave quite a large memory footprint, especially when served through the beast that is Apache. Don't get me wrong, I think Apache is a great webserver and have used it for years without any real problems, but sometimes you need to squeeze a little more performance than Apache is willing to give.

Drupal 6 media streaming: Media Mover, FLV Media Player and XSPF Playlist

Having just completed building another Drupal media streaming website and I thought I'd take the time to share some of my experiences, especially seeing as two of my most popular articles are about Drupal and media streaming (Drupal 6 video streaming roundup and Drupal 6 media streaming with Dash Media Player). Things however, have come along a fiar bit since I wrote those articles.

Format the "Submitted by..." text for Drupal 6 nodes and comments

I don't like the way Drupal formats the "Submitted by..." text for nodes and comments. So, I did a little bit of digging and found the offending code in the theme_node_submitted() and theme_comment_submitted() functions of node.module and comment.module respectively.

How to customise the comment form in Drupal 6

Most forms in drupal can be customised, or 'themed' by writing a few lines of code in your theme's template.php file. However, the comment form is one of a few exceptions where this doesn't work - not with a little extra magic anyway. As always, there is more than one possible approach, some of them are good, some bad. In this article, we'll be doing it the right way - The Drupal way.

BT: unlimited != unlimited

I have an 'unlimited' broadband connection from BT. So I used it to download some of my music off a server that I have in England, at the same time I was in the process of rebuilding a machine and so I had to download a lot of (free) software. I downloaded a few gigabytes, and now BT have throttled my connection, with an estimation of it being back to speed in 17 days time.

Drupal meetup, Ireland - a big success

Today's Drupal meetup in Ireland was, in my opinion, a huge success with a turnout of 70+ Drupalers with varying levels of Drupal experience. Surprisingly, almost half of the people who attended were complete newcomers, many of whom had never even installed Drupal!

CSS3 - When will the final recommendation be ready?

I've been hearing a lot about CSS3 lately and I'm quite excited by some of it's new features, such as rounded corners, multiple backgrounds and opacity. But what I want to know is, when will it be ready to use?

An introduction to Jaxer - the worlds first ajax server

I don't think many people have heard of Aptana's Jaxer. I only found it by pure chance, but once I started to read about it I was hooked. What a great idea - an ajax server that gives you the ability to write an entire ajax application in one language, Javascript.

Exclude page hits from Drupal 6 statistics

The Drupal statistics module doesn't offer a lot in the way on configuration; It's basically either on or off. When it is on, it's not particularly clever about the way that it keeps track of page reads, simply incrementing a counter every time a node is accessed, and there is no control over what counts as a hit and what doesn't.

If your or your site administrators do a lot of work on the site from day to day, writing articles, tweaking things here and there, then every single time they view a post views will be logged, resulting in a skewed post read counter.

New Drupal 6 module: IP to Locale

Drupal is set up fairly well for multilingual sites. However, it does make the assumption that each site version will be in a different language. It is quite feasible however, that there be two versions of a site in the same language. For example, A site which has a UK version, and a version for the Republic of Ireland. Both sites are written in English, but the content varies for each.

Getting started with jQuery - 7 of the most useful resources

In recent times, a lot of general purpose javascript libraries have surfaced, making common javascript tasks a quick and easy to implement. To name a few, there is Script.aculo.us, Dojo and of course, Prototype. But, one of the most recent, and possibly the most powerful and flexible is jQuery.

Aptana Jaxer 1.0 - The road to Ajax heaven just got official.

If you've ever tried creating an Ajax application, you've probably run into one of the most common problems that face Ajax developers. How do you get the JavaScript that's running in your clients browser to interact with your server-side scripts?

8 reasons to choose Linux for your next OS

I've been using Linux for several years now on various web servers, proxy servers, home servers and more, but I've only recently started using it on my personal laptop (unless you count Mac OS X as Linux - which it basically is in many ways).

Make a Drupal Block Visible for Entire Site Sections but NOT Specific Sub-sections or Pages

This little php snippet has come to the rescue many times throughout my Drupal development days. It lets you use includes and excludes in your Drupal block visibility settings - something that you can not do out of the box.

For example, it would allow you to: