Articles 71 to 80
If you have ever been working on code to realize that you cannot commit the changes that you have made to the original branch you were working in, it might get a bit annoying. Fortunaltely, there is an easy way to commit your code in a new branch (without you losing any data).
In order to do that, you only need to follow three steps:
When using javascript in Rails in order to fill in forms and remain on the same page, it is nice if after submitting and resetting the form, the focus is set back on the first element of the form. In order to do this, you can simply use the following piece of JS in your file.js.erb:
Ubercart comes with a catalog that allows to display the different products in categories. This is a pretty nice and convenient way to browse through the different product families but for the product browsing itself, a list is much more easy to go through. The problem with the catalog list / table default display, is that it doesn’t use Views but rather a default call to the ubercart table display.
Fortunately, Ubercart makes it easy to override this default call. For this, one just needs to define a themable function (theme_uc_catalog_products($products)) in template.php in order to make a call to a predefined view with the function views_embed_view.
While working on the online store of D-Sight, it was necessary to include a link back to the cart when a user is on the checkout page. It is possible to click on the Cancel button but this is a bit counter-intuitive and one might not know whether the cart will remain or whether it will be emptied. Therefore, two options have been considered:
While trying to ensure that a website created in Drupal was correctly verified with Google webmasters tools, I needed to add some metadata to the homepage of the website. Since this was a one shot only operation, it was not necessary to modify the full website template. Instead, in such cases, it can be done quite easily by adding the following bit of PHP code to the body of the home page and to ensure that the input format is set to PHP code.
When I wrote the article about drupal and metadata, I needed to include some code snippets in order to illustrate what needed to be done. At the time, only nanoc, haml and sass were installed in my environment to generate this website. While I thought that it would be trivial to display code between pre tags, it turned out that I coudn’t get haml to display anything properly - even though I tried pretty much every combination (:preserve, whitespace preservation ~, …) in the haml-lang website.
An easy way to limit (or fully avoid) spamming is to encrypt the email addresses that appear on your website. In order to do that, services exist and help you convert your email address (or even the complete mailto: link) into hexadecimal entities.
The following two services can be used for such a purpose:
A lot of others services are obviously available and a simple search on Google for “encrypt email” will provide you a lot of results but I have been very happy with those two so far and they have been used with success on D-Sight website as well as on this website.
It seems that I am spending some time learning Drupal so the content of this post may defer from the editorial line a bit but as usual, I hope it may help someone.
The current drupal installation I am working with has CCK and Popups: Add and Reference (let’s call it PAR for future (shorter) references) modules. Unfortunately, by default the links added by PAR are in a new div tag below the input fields which increase the length of the form quite a bit as you can see below.
What I am proposing here is a way to put the PAR links inline with the input field. I am quite a beginner with Drupal so the method may not be really clean or fail proof and your comments about any easier way of doing it are welcomed. The result looks like the screenshot below.
Still working with Drupal and still learning a lot… The challenge I was facing was to let users upload files to a specific folder but to restrict access to that file so that it cannot be downloaded by anybody simply by giving the file path (private download). Therefore, users are allowed to post content but not access it (otherwise nothing prevent them to access files from other users in the folders).
Fortunately - as often with Drupal - there are already solutions on the web:
It is no secret, it is easy to share a firefox profile. I am running a dual boot Linux / Windows and was therefore interested to share my Firefox profile between the two. But in the process, I actually became interested to be able to access that profile from my work computer. After all, there are already extensions to store bookmarks remotely so why not do the same with the complete profile.
This is the reason why I decided to create a new profile on my Dropbox. That way, the profile is stored remotely and synchronized in real-time between my work computer and my personal computer (both Linux and Windows).
Creating a new profile can be done in two ways. The first is by using
the graphical interface and the second is by modifying the profiles.ini
file directly. I will present both.
