JQuery
Developers Think of Design as Black Magic
Developers think of design as Black Magic*. Really.
Blog
Drupal
Metal Toad is a DrupalCon Gold Sponsor
Metal Toad is proud to be a gold sponsor for DrupalCon SF 2010. If you see us there, say hello!
Design
Getting started on displaying videos with the Brightcove iPhone SDK
There's a lot of good to be said about the Brightcove iPhone SDK, it's easy, it seems to work really well, but there's also a ton of gotchas and the...
Design
When it comes to web development, it can be tough to be the last person to touch something
Do you remember that Art Director who burst into your office with a crazy deadline for a print piece and then let you figure out who to actually make...
Artificial Intelligence
Dylan Wilder-Tack, Drupal Security Team Member
When discussing the benefits of open-source frameworks (especially Drupal), I've often heard, "But if everyone has access to the source code, how...
Clearing the state of a actionscript 3 app (aka, globals are eeevil)
Imagination time: Imagine for a moment that you have an app, it has one button and one little window. When you click the button it changes the text...
Business
The Value of 10% Time in Improving Your Life and Productivity
Convincing people that 10% time is valuable can sometimes be a chore but I'm probably one of the luckiest guys in the country because my bosses...
Artificial Intelligence
Design has a big impact on web development
You know that button on the website you want to change? The one that looks like it was designed in 1999? Guess what? It was designed in 1999, and so...
Drupal
A tiny cart block for Ubercart
Here's a tiny shopping cart block for Ubercart that fits right in with the menu. Of course the standard block could be themed this way, but this is...
Drupal
Drupal Theming 101: Theme Developer Module
If you haven't already heard of it, the Theme Developer is a great tool. It works like firebug, but for Drupal.
Artificial Intelligence
What Every Designer Should Know About Development
As someone who has worked in the web industry for over 10 years, I've seen a lot of friction between designers and developers.
Drupal
Drupal Theming 101: How to Remove System Stylesheets
When you first start creating a Drupal theme, you might be frustrated by the large number of stylesheets that are included by default in your theme...
PHP
Facebook API Terminology
The toad just finished a small project involving the Facebook API and by far the most confusing aspect of the project was the terminology regarding...
Artificial Intelligence
NTP out of sync?
Is your unix-based system time out of sync? If it is out of sync by more that 1000 seconds, you will need to manually force it back into sync.
Drupal
Recursively load nodes from a rich data model
If you've ever worked with a rich data model in drupal you know it can be a pain to load up all the children and parents of a node within the...
Drupal
Drupal and Fivestar, ajax style. A short case study.
So there we were, facing a Flash based video player that could have multiple tabs of many videos apiece.
Drupal
Customizing views_cycle module for differently styled marquees
During the theming process for the Emmys, specifically Emmys.com and Emmys.tv, we were presented with 2 differently styled marquees. On Emmys.com,...
Artificial Intelligence
Quick Drupal Cacherouter and Boost benchmarks
In the discussion following my last post about cron and the cache hit rate, I promised to do
Drupal
More complete breadcrumbs for Ubercart checkout
By default, Ubercart sets the breadcrumb on the checkout page to simply "Home", which I personally find a bit odd. Because it calls...
Business
How Drupal's cron is killing you in your sleep + a simple cache warmer
A lot of what's written about performance tuning for Drupal is focused on large sites, and benchmarking is often done by requesting the same page...
Drupal
Allowing CCK to handle the weight of your form elements
Lately I've been working on a project to allow drupal to intelligently manage legacy data, to display, edit, and work with all aspects of the data as...
Drupal
Repositioning node comments
A strange quirk in Drupal 6 hard-codes comment rendering into the node module. This makes it quite difficult to reposition comments, for instance...
Artificial Intelligence
Deployment with Capistrano Part 2: Drush integration
In my last post, a basic intro to to running cap deploy was presented. Now, let's look at some more advanced scenarios. (See Part 1 for the actual...
Artificial Intelligence
Whitehouse.gov re-launches on Drupal
If you have ever spent any time around software development, (especially here in Portland with our amazing open-source community) you'll know that...
Drupal
Capistrano: Drupal deployments made easy, Part 1
I'm a big fan of having an automated deployment process. It's really the web development analog to the "one step build process", as described in the...