Friday, Apr 10, 2015
More Ansible goodness this week. We’ve been working on a basic playbook to set up the innovatively-named Monit monitoring tool to keep an eye on our webservers and give them a kick up the backside if they’re misbehaving.
It’s based on a very useful Ansible Galaxy role, pgolm’s Monit, which installs and configures the tool. However, the role’s documentation doesn’t necessarily make it obvious how to get the best from Monit, so here’s an example playbook for monitoring PHP, MySQL and Nginx to get things started: ...
Tuesday, Mar 24, 2015
Three months ago, we were introduced to the wonders of Ansible at Drupal Camp Brighton. Since then, whenever we’ve had the chance we’ve been working on various Ansible playbooks to automate many of our development and maintenance processes.
For a small team like us, Ansible is invaluable. It is reducing the time we need to spend administering our servers and sites exponentially, freeing up extra time for development.
Development and testing happen more quickly as well, and we can be more confident about deployment to live running smoothly because of better consistency between our environments. ...
Monday, Mar 9, 2015
An interesting problem we’ve faced recently was that one one of our sites, our FlexNav based mobile menus were being forced to display even on large devices when advanced css aggregation was switched on.
When we switched it off to investigate the problem, it was magically resolved. Turn it back on again, and FlexNav breaks. On some pages of the site, the menus displayed as expected even when aggregation was switched on, though that might have been because those pages were more heavily cached. ...
Tuesday, Mar 3, 2015
By default, Flot with the Flot categories plugin doesn’t allow for you to use the ticks or tickSize option to show less ticks when there are too many data points on the x-axis for all of the labels to fit.
Our initial thought was to attempt to achieve this using a Ticks function inside the axis options. Unfortunately, this proved to be impossible due to the fact that the function appeared to run once for every tick on the axis, which would make it unworkable once we added the necessary computation. ...
Tuesday, Feb 24, 2015
Recently we’ve been working on updating our clients page, which required us to think, for the first time in a while, “what do people want from a clients page?”.
Our first thought as developers was to start bashing out lengthy case studies documenting the finer points of Drupal Commerce configuration and Apache Solr setups, but then we remembered we weren’t writing them for our benefit and went back to the drawing board. ...
Monday, Feb 16, 2015
At Will Hall Online, we’ve recently started using the Geany IDE for Linux, and as there doesn’t seem to have been a great amount written about, it, we thought we’d share some of our first impressions of the program.
First off, it seems to have pretty good support for PHP and Javascript, which forms the bulk of our coding. It’s got some really handy plugins, such as a version control one that allows you to push stuff straight to Git. ...
Tuesday, Feb 3, 2015
Alongside developing lots of different websites in Drupal, we also maintain and administer a number of different servers. In this role we occasionally end up managing a number of different domain names. It struck us as interesting that many people don’t really understand the difference between using the domain with or without www, for example www.willhallonline.co.uk and willhallonline.co.uk. They are technically two different subdomains of willhallonline.co.uk, however, it has to be stressed that they are different. ...
Monday, Feb 2, 2015
Most Drupal Commerce sites, one would think, are likely to want to send emails to their customers detailing the contents and total cost of their order for confirmation purposes. However, it can be surprisingly difficult to show all of the information required, so I thought I’d write something down to make sure I have something to refer to next time this comes up!
By default, the tokens available to the commerce mail module only show each individual line item and the order total. ...
Monday, Jan 19, 2015
We ran into this error PHP Warning: Error while sending QUERY packet. PID=25016 the other day when trying to run an update query on a database with approximately 3.8 million records in it. New data had become available for 2.1 million of these records.
These were submitted using a PHP program which fetched and parsed enormous CSV files before using a PDO statement to insert or update the records into MySQL. ...
Monday, Jan 12, 2015
In 2014, Will Hall Online took on several new members of staff and undertook several of its biggest projects yet. It was an exciting year for the business, but was not without its challenges. One of the most significant of these was an ever-increasing administrative workload resulting from this growth.
To help manage our operations, we’ve adopted a range of technologies which help us to track the amount of time we spend on projects, communicate issues with clients, and maintain our social media presence. ...
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