Generating styled images programmatically

Submitted by cpliakas
on November 18th, 2012 at 9:45:33 AM

Drupal 7 ships with image handling in core, which is two tons of awesome. How the system works is that site builders create different image styles via the UI specifying the required processing, the most common being resizing. The image markup is rendered via Drupal's theme layer and sent of the end user, and when the browser interprets the page it requests a cached version of the styled image. If it exists, the web server returns it. If not, the Drupal application creates the styled image, writes the cached file, and then returns it to the end user.

But what if you want to read the contents

Series: 
Technology toolshed

Prepopulating and hiding entityreference fields

Submitted by cpliakas
on November 17th, 2012 at 11:38:46 AM

One of the most powerful features of Drupal is the ability to build out your data model via the UI. In addition, modules such as Entityreference allow site builders to establish relationships between content. Although Drupal provides a widget out-of-the-box that allows people to manual set the relationships via the node creation form, is it not uncommon where the relationship is predefined and you want to prepopulate and hide the form element to improve the UX of the form.

Series: 
Technology toolshed

Bye Bye, Search Lucene API!

Submitted by cpliakas
on September 29th, 2011 at 3:38:29 PM

Search has been a passion of mine for some time now. In many ways the Search Lucene API module was my introduction to Drupal and helped me understand and love the platform. Therefore I am somewhat sad to announce that Search Lucene API has reached "end of life".

The reason for this decision is that the Drupal search community is fragmented. If you want to customize the search module you are using, you have to write code that only works for that specific module.

Series: 
Personal

What is Drupal?

Submitted by cpliakas
on September 15th, 2011 at 9:25:09 AM

Excellent video by Steve Purkiss explaining what Drupal is.

 

What is Drupal? from Larchmont Films on Vimeo.

Series: 
Technology toolshed

Switching Positions

Submitted by cpliakas
on May 5th, 2011 at 10:53:54 PM

Someone once told me that 70% of all technology projects fail.  Regardless of whether the statistic is true, it stuck to me like glue.  As an engineer I always asked myself what I could have done differently to have made a project more successful, although it seemed the failures had much more effort put into them than the successes.  When I joined Acquia as a consultant, I was surprised to see that many organizations were also experiencing the same anomaly.

There are many factors that contribute to the failure of a project, but a common ingredient is the mismanagement of expectations.

Series: 
Personal

Move over, "Kitten Killers"

Submitted by cpliakas
on March 22nd, 2011 at 4:40:13 PM

Move over, Kitten Killers. Drupal has a new anthem.

Series: 
Personal

Programmatic Document Conversion with OpenOffice

Submitted by cpliakas
on February 22nd, 2011 at 7:39:48 PM

OpenOffice is a free and open source productivity suite that is capable of reading and writing a majority of common document formats. One of its hidden features is that it can be run "headless" via the command line which spawns a listener that responds to requests for automated tasks. Using this technique, OpenOffice can be set up as a service to transcode Microsoft documents into well formed HTML and other common formats.

The commands required to convert documents are a bit convoluted, but fortunately Dag Wieers created a python wrapper that greatly simplifies the process.

Series: 
Thinking outside of the drop

Walk Left, Stand Right

Submitted by cpliakas
on January 19th, 2011 at 10:12:51 PM

As a member of Acquia's Professional Services team, I am constantly on the road helping customers succeed with Drupal.  This week I am back in Washington DC, and one of my favorite aspects of the city is the Metro.  Coming from Boston, I really appreciate the continuous notifications of when trains will be arriving, but it is how people adhere to unofficial governances that makes the system stand out.  Let people off the train before getting on. Move towards the center of the car to make room for others.

Series: 
Travel log