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dan's picture

Metal Toad University #9: Going Live

by , Front-End Architect / Fun Master

This week we took our site live, but before we did that one of our students Lewis Notestine had created a new theme for our site: Space! We used Git version control to merge his changes into ours, then made a few modifications to the triggers and our new theme was in place. We then bought a domain name from NameCheap.com and fumbled around with DNS settings. By the end of the class, we still couldn't see our site, but that was due to DNS propagation taking forever and a missing symlink. Once those things were corrected we were able to go to beekandbrooke.com to visit our site. Here's the movie: Read More…

0 comments. Posted on . Filed under mtu, training.

slavko's picture

Writing a simple Sublime Text plugin.

by , Web Developer

For the most part I like to keep my code editors as light and vanilla as possible. Some of the basic features that I like to see in my editor include auto indentation, syntax highlighting and ability to search across the project. Anything that will help debugging my codebase is a plus. Sublime Text offers all of these features out of the box and much more with the addition of community contributed plugins. One of the neat Sublime Text features is that it provides you with a list of commands which you can extend (or write your own) and assign them to different key binds. Read More…

dan's picture

Metal Toad University #8: The Wolf Theme

by , Front-End Architect / Fun Master

This session had us finding new images to create a new theme for our site. Once our new wolf images and patterns were created and exported, we went about with the theming. I added one class to the HMTL: wolf. Then we found the styles that were specifying images and copied them to a new location in our CSS and prefixed them with the wolf class. That made this: Read More…

0 comments. Posted on . Filed under mtu, training.

dan's picture

Metal Toad University #7: First Site Done!

by , Front-End Architect / Fun Master

Want to join Metal Toad University? Join the Google+ Page. Our 8th class was all about finishing the one page scrolling web page that we started on a few classes back. We had a some more styling to do and that wasn't surprising because most of the work on a simple web page is styling. Right off the bat I did some minor styling tweaks that made the page shadow flow around the entire page and I changed it's color by modifying the box-shadow property. Then we worked on the main content body and added a semi-transparent white to the box behind it. This gave the text more contrast and made it easier to read. Read More…

2 comments. Posted on . Filed under mtu, training.

joaquin's picture

What's in a Brand?

by , President & Founder

People often ask me where the name for my company came from. Lots of brand names have no meaning or names that have little in a modern context. Coke, Nike, Intel are all good examples. Reflecting on this left me thinking about what is in a brand and why do we care about them? Read More…

robbie's picture

ToadCast 014 - Everyone's got a phone and a toilet

by , Web Developer

Joining me for our 14th ToadCast is Chris Trahey where we talk about doing what is right for your clients and the benefits of developers as technical sales. We also discuss notification overload, the anxiety surrounding a desire to know everything, and managing your todo list. Read More…

jonathan's picture

Drush pm-download and pm-update: When and Why to Use Each

by , Web Developer

Drush is a Drupal developers Swiss-army knife. Of course there are the favorite commands that you probably use every day: drush sql-cli, drush pm-enable. Drush pm-download and drush pm-update are probably pretty commonly used as well. I'm going to use their aliases for the rest of this blog post: drush dl and drush up. drush up is actually a combination of drush pm-updatecode (drush upc) and drush updatedb (drush updb). In my examples I'll be using the Views module, but the same applies for any module or theme. Read More…

1 comment. Posted on . Filed under drupal, drush.

katie's picture

Leading with 'Why'

by , Project Manager

When clients come to Metal Toad, they're looking to get something done - improve or add features, upgrade their site or perhaps build something new all together. As a result, our conversations with clients often begin with a statement and a question: "Here's what we need" and "How is Metal Toad going to get it done?" Unfortunately, leading with the 'What' and the 'How' has several pitfalls, the greatest of which is scope creep. A client not starting a web development discussion with "Why are we doing this?" increases the likelihood of changes to what is needed and ultimately, how Metal Toad is going to deliver the results. Read More…

chris's picture

How to Fix Caching for Views With Exposed Filters in Drupal 7

by , Web Developer

One of the better features of the views module in Drupal is the ability to cache your view's output. This can come in handy when your view is doing a lot of computation. Caching your view will save your server a lot of unneeded work. One of the big current drawbacks of this feature is if you enable caching for your view and you have an exposed filter, you'll run into the following scenario: User A enters a value for the filter Read More…

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