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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…

joaquin's picture

Open Source is the New Microsoft

by , President & Founder

When I was starting out in the web industry back before the turn of century, open source options were available but were often ruled out as risky business investments. At the time, they were relatively feature poor (compared to enterprise solutions) and a bet on the wrong technology could potentially cost someone their job. It was around this time that I heard the phrase "no one gets fired for choosing Microsoft", but times have changed. Read More…

joaquin's picture

How to Improve Your Reputation as an Open Source Provider

by , President & Founder

If you are as open source service provider (Drupal, etc) you have a distinct advantage over many peer in the web development arena. With open source you are leveraging tens of millions of dollars worth of software and bringing that value to bear on even the smallest project you work on; you are part of a vibrant community that has drawn (and continues to draw) both amazing development talent and high-profile customers, who look for your services by name. All of that said, there are some things a CMS like Drupal doesn't bring to the table, and those elements are critical to improving your reputation in the field. So what are those elements? Read More…

dan's picture

Metal Toad University #5: The Gathering

by , Front-End Architect / Fun Master

OMG, no video! For shame! We had some technical difficulties (read: Dan was a doofus), so there was no audio on the video. So while you could watch it, it probably wouldn't be that helpful. Sorry! But here's what we did: This class was where we finally started putting everything together to work on an actual site: Beek and Brooke's Bloody Bash. This is my annual Halloween party and an easy target for a fun little demo site. First we downloaded an HTML5 Boilerplate template from http://html5boilerplate.com/ that we used as a base. This is a great template that includes a lot of little helpers that help your site perform well, as well as look good on older browsers. Read More…

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tom's picture

ChickTech High School Workshop

by , Web Developer

All developers know the feeling of accomplishment that comes with completing a tricky section of code. To me that feeling is a distant second to the accomplishment felt when teaching someone else the joys of this hobby/career that I hold so dear. This past weekend (Jan. 26th & 27th, 2013) Portland State University graciously hosted the Chicktech High School Workshop where I had the privilege of being on a team that introduced an entire lab full of high school age young women to Drupal. Read More…

pbliss's picture

Drupal 7 Tutorial: Customizing Services Input and Output format

by , Web Developer

Recently I was working with the Drupal services module, and ran into a few hang ups. For my project I needed a rest service that could export xml that matched a specific format, and consume xml and store it in the database for later processing. To do this I created a custom services resource, this was pretty straight forward. I found a few really great sites that explain how this is done. This one in particular is quite helpful. It was when I attempted to customize the output and input that I ran into some hang ups. When attempting to research more about how it is done, I found very little information posted anywhere. In this brief tutorial I will outline how I was able to achieve my goals, and hopefully save you some time. Read More…

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