Thursday, Apr 22, 2010
Choosing the right server for your drupal site can be a difficult process. What specifications do you need, what about connections/ftp/ssh host reliability and such like? With the plethora or hosting packages available on the internet, probably 10,000+ it can be tricky deciding on what may be best for your site. Here are a few pointers that I think about when choosing hosting/servers.
What is the expectations of your hosting provider? ...
Thursday, Apr 22, 2010
Drupal as a massive extensible CMS has a plethora of useful and frankly fantastic modules. Her are the top ten as I am using them, obviously the drupal site has a list of the most used modules on Drupal, however, I thought I might just suggest my favorites too:
Views (it makes the whole database flexible which is obviously invaluable) CCK (make data as you want it) Mollom (brilliant spam detection and easy integration) WYSIWIG (because sometimes it is so much easier) Pathauto (brilliant SEO tool and makes my life easier) I know what you are thinking, “You’ve missed out …” Well this is just a start, and I wouldn’t run a site with just these, but realistically speaking you can make almost anything with these 5 modules quickly and simply. ...
Thursday, Apr 15, 2010
After presenting on ‘Migration to Drupal’ on Monday 12th April at DrupalCambs, had a few good chats about the nature of the Drupal database and associated points.
Potentially, Migration to Drupal, I believe is fairly straighforward depending that you understand both the source and the target data well. Therefore in most cases you need to know your database and the Drupal MySql (or PostgreSql) database. However, for future reference it appears that when using content management systems, there is a belief that you don’t need to understand how the data interacts providing that it does. ...
Monday, Mar 29, 2010
Recently I have been reading a lot more about NoSQL databases, specifically MongoDB and CouchDB, ad how 2010 will be the year of NoSql. NoSql databases themselves move away from the structure of a relational database, mssql/mysql, and move more toward storing all of their data in views, which can contain a range of information.
Why NoSql? Well NoSql’s inherant lack of rigid structure enables it to be far more flexible with regards to the data that you can insert. ...
Thursday, Mar 25, 2010
The migration of OsCommerce user to Drupal user can be a troublesome one, largely due to the password storage within OsCommerce. Ryan from Ubercart “the osCommerce method of storing passwords involves using “salt” on the password… appending some random characters and making an MD5 of it all. You can’t undo MD5 hashes to get the original password, unfortunately, and Drupal just uses an MD5 of the password itself” (http://www.ubercart.org/forum/development/1379/oscommerce_ubercart).
Therefore, the entirety of users to be migrated is tricky, however, a large amount of the details can be sent across as required. ...
Sunday, Mar 21, 2010
Following the uploading of products to one product database within phpmyadmin/mysql root, you will now have a Drupal database with a new table named ‘products’ within it. You can then use the table wizard module to expose the table to the migrate module and draw relationships between the ‘products’ and ‘uc_products’ database table.
I have added another little script which runs almost the same process as the migrate module, however, this may need to be edited to run successfully: ...
Saturday, Mar 20, 2010
The difficult thing that appears with moving the products using the migrate moduel appears to be the inability to put multiple tables into one table. To counteract this I ended up migrating all ot the Oscommerce product data into one database table and then sending the content over with the migrate module. The code ended up something like this although this is obviously editable dependant on what data you have in Oscommerce/want in Drupal: ...
Wednesday, Mar 10, 2010
The process of migrating Oscommerce to Drupal Ubercart, does involve a few processes, however, the advantages are numerous. Check out http://www.ubercart.org/drupal-ecommerce and http://groups.drupal.org/node/8096 for some data about why Ubercart/Migrating from Oscommerce. Personally I feel that the codebase of oscommerce has become very outdated and is no longer running to the potential it could. Alongside this, the Drupal project is growing and Oscommerce shrinking, with a large proportion of new modules being produced for Drupal/Ubercart. ...
Friday, Dec 18, 2009
I have been reading a bit recently about how speed is going to become very relevent in search engines results. And I do no mean merely the speed of the web server/site. Speed to me means two sepearte things. Both the speed of the site, and the speed which you can get your article/posting/page listed in search results.
##1. Page Speed
I have been recently working on getting a few of my sites running quicker. ...
Wednesday, Nov 11, 2009
I was recently asked the question of how applicable Drupal/Joomla are for a large site. Here is my answer:
I have attempted to break down your points to make answering some of your questions easier. I have been developing with Joomla and Drupal for over 2 years and have created around 20 joomla sites and 20 drupal sites, one of which is a 15 site multisite.
1. Complex(but user friendly) navigation/categorisation Obviously the flexibility afforded by Drupal is a contrast to the user friendly nature of Joomla. ...
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