Recent Blog Posts

We've been slowly growing as a company over the last few months - it's worth taking some time to acknowledge the changes.

Steve Harley

Steve Harley joined the team last September and has been getting up to speed on code and community ever since, posting a monochrome print friendly Druplicon. I've known Steve for a while and worked with him on projects related to our neighborhood in Denver. Steve's role is primarily as a Drupal generalist, though he obviously has some skill as a designer which comes from years in the publishing industry. Most recently he worked on desktop development with Filemaker, Python and other scripting tools.

Ezra Barnett Gildesgame

After working with Ezra previously, it is great to be able to work with him again. Ezra is a Drupal generalist and proud maintainer of several modules on drupal.org. He joined the team last November and has already co-taught Denver area GVS trainings along with other development and support work. Most recently before GVS, Ezra worked as an independent consultant to Flat World Knowlwedge.

Dave Reid

As Drupal developers and themers, we spend a lot of our time referring to the Drupal API Reference which provides great information about functions to use and how to write code for Drupal. It can be a little daunting to look at that site if you are a new user: what are you searching for? what areas should you explore? For more seasoned developers there are times when api.drupal.org is not as useful: what if you are offline or just want a quick overview of the functions you use most often?

So, we built up this cheat sheet to provide a guide of important functions new users might not know and also to give a quick reference sheet for more advanced developers.

Download the Drupal API Cheat Sheet

You can download the cheat sheet in pdf format which is linked to api.drupal.org in case you need more information on a specific function.

After gathering suggested functions we had some room on the card and debated: more functions that are less valuable or some related topics. We decided to go for some related topics and added just a smidgen of Linux Command Line fun with useful commands and cvs tips. We also included the tiniest form example to get folks started down the road to awesome forms using the FormAPI.

I often update code by adding files in a bunch of directories and then need to add all thosefiles to the svn repository. Here is the command line one-liner to get that done and an explanation:

svn stat | grep "^?" | awk '{print $2}' | xargs svn add

1. svn stat tells you the status of all the files in the directory with a question mark at the beginning of the line for any files that svn doesn't currently know about (i.e. that aren't under revision control).
2. The next step is to pipe that to a grep command that looks for lines beginning with a question mark so that we can add only those items to svn.
3. Next, since the output of svn stat is a two column listing split by whitespace with the status indicator first and the full path to the file second, we use a simple awk pattern to print out just filename
4. Finally, we use the xargs command to take the input and pass it on to the svn add command which schedules the files to be added to the repository.

I will typically run svn stat | less first and review the output to make sure that the command is only going to add things I want. I do the same thing just before any commit. If you need to undo the addition of some file prior to the commit, simply svn revert filename or use the recursive flag like svn revert --recursive path/to/directory/ if you are dealing with a directory.

Once you're happy with the changes, all you need to do is an actual svn commit so that the files will be permanently added to the repository.

We recently helped out with the development of a pretty neat multiple vendor e-commerce website. In working on it much of the code was custom but we were able to build a novel, generic per user content type quota system. Each user can purchase credits towards their quota, which allows them to submit new content.

About LolliShops - Multi Shop Marketplace

The easiest way to describe LolliShops is an upscale boutique version of Etsy, built in Drupal. Lollishops provides a turnkey solution for artistic individuals who make jewelry, clothing and art by hand. Anyone can sign up and setup a personalized online store in minutes. It focuses on the Frou Frou market (if you're not familiar with it, it's probably best described by the site). So far, LolliShops has thousands of individual stores. The theme and products shown on the home page give a great sense of the intended audience. Vendors on the site purchase the ability to sell their products on the site with 3 different selling arrangements. Two of these arrangements limit the number of products that they can create, requiring a quota system.

About the User Quota Module

Of course the first thing I did when looking to build that quota functionality was to compare all of the existing solutions. I posted a summary of my research into the Duplicate Modules Hall of Shame group for others to benefit from the research. It seemed like there was no way to do exactly what we need with the existing modules, so I set to work building a new module.