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Notes from a Northern conference

14th October 2011

Last week I went to (and gave a tutorial at) the PHP North West conference, in Manchester.

Conference feedback

As always, the organisers did a fantastic job. PHPNW know how to put on a great conference, so huge thanks for all the time and effort they put in.

Ideas, thoughts, and interesting things

This is really a bit of a disjointed brain-dump of a list, because I haven't had time to really read up on these things yet.

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Piping to PHP

19th September 2011

Pipes are cool, super-uber cool. Simple, elegant, and opens up more functionality than you can shake a stick at.

Unfortunately they're rather unused in the PHP community.

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1 comment

Colouring in bash for OS-X

01st September 2011

I like colours. I like things to stand out. Most of all, I like to be very very clear which computer I'm using when I'm typing in commands (init 0; wait-no-that wasn't the production server, was it?!)

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2 comments

Drupal performance tutorial at PHPNW 7 October

26th August 2011

The PHP North-West conference is an annual conference favourite of mine...This year they're running a tutorial day for the first time - and I'm pleased to say I'm running a tutorial on Drupal performance (and the tools we use to make Drupal faster).

I'll be talking about topics including:

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Always On (IRC)

18th May 2011

Addicted to IRC?
Feel like you're missing out when you're not logged in?
You're not alone. But there is an answer! (And it's not a self-help group).

ZNC is an IRC bouncer. Basically, it stays permanently connected to the IRC servers; you connect to ZNC, and it re-plays any messages that were sent whilst you were disconnected.

Hacking contextual links in Drupal 7

06th February 2011

Drupal 7 comes with some cool new tools like contextual links

Contextual links are added to blocks using hook_block_view or hook_block_view_alter:

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2 comments

Building a WYSIWYG plugin in Drupal

21st December 2010

As developers, we usually praise and curse WYSIWYG editors equally. They all suffer from issues, but they're usually better than the alternative - trying to convince clients and content editors to use raw HTML? Not likely!

These usually work with input filters: say for example, you have a YouTube plugin which lets you enter a video ID and embeds the video in the post.

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9 comments

Customising the labels on radio-buttons

29th November 2010

Thought I'd quickly blog about this whilst this is fresh in my head!

Sometimes you want to add detail to a set of radio-buttons - e.g. you may want to show an example image below the radio-button's label:

Choose cable connection
( ) VGA
    [ pic of VGA cable ]

( ) DVI
    [ pic of DVI cable ]

( ) DisplayPort
    [ pic of DisplayPort cable ]

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1 comment

Overriding URLs with Drupal panel pages

06th October 2010

Hi, My name's Marcus, and I'm addicted to Drupal panels.
(For those of you who haven't come across this wonderdrug before, panels is a layout-engine for Drupal: it lets you add and lay out content, blocks, views and other panels on the page. And it's awesome!)

Panels has a UI which lets you setup new panel pages: e.g. you could add the URL /jobs for your jobs listing page.

A set of system URLs can also be overridden: e.g. node/%node can be overridden to use a panel-page instead of the core node_page_view function.

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4 comments

Anti-virus for Drupal sites

29th September 2010

Anti-virus is a subject that's drummed into us continually, bombarded as we are by a constant barrage of infected emails, exploits, attacks on web-servers.

Your server may well be firewalled, patched, protected by strong passwords and all the rest, but many Drupal sites have an attack-vector left wide open: file uploads.

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2 comments

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