Articles

Concertgemaal Flyer

The flex workspace I rent in Amsterdam is called Concertgemaal. Each month the space is repurposed as a classical concert hall. To promote these concerts a flyer is designed by Bart van den Tooren (BVDT). Since I liked the design so much I flexed some css muscles and recreated it online.

You can view it on the Concertgemaal site.

Drupal 7 email fields

Sometimes the small tips are the nicest. If you own a smartphone or tablet it can be annoying to enter an email address in a regular textfield. If you fill out a form and select the email field you expect a virtual keyboard layout suited for filling in email addresses, not your default keyboard layout. The simple trick to get this field to behave is to use the correct HTML5 tag.

Drupal 8 is an opportunity to learn

DrupalCon Prague has just finished. One of the major topics this conference was the unrest about the incipient Drupal 8 release in the Drupal community. Only recently Drupal was forked into Backdrop. "Drupal 8 is too complex" seems to be the main argument to fork.

Dynamic Colour Schemes

This website looks slightly different than it did yesterday. As a proof of concept I’ve made some changes to the header image and colour scheme. The very basic outline of the Code Culture logo allows it to be overlaid on any image (that isn’t too white). I’ve created a custom Drupal module which extracts a colour palette from any uploaded image. The 5 selected colors need to be distinct enough to form a palette. With some colour adaptations these 5 selected colours are used for generic things such as the breadcrumbs, link colours, and the striped background.

Drupal 7 BlogApi

I’m back at testing the Drupal BlogApi. The XMLRPC blogapi used to be a core module in Drupal 6. But in Drupal 7 this module has been moved to contrib (ie, it’s no longer part of the Drupal core). But… the contrib module has been in an unstable state for some years now. Enter the Alternative Blogapi contrib module. It sounds daft to have 2 blog api modules in contrib (and it is). But at least this alternative is working (sort of).

Redis + Drupal @ Byte webhosting

For Amsterdam based hosting provider Byte I've written a short dutch tutorial on how to configure Redis cache on a Drupal 7 site on their hosting platform. Below the gist:

---

Hosting provider Byte heeft sinds kort een cache service in beta draaien. Deze service, Redis, serveert cache direct uit geheugen en is daarom veel sneller dan de Drupal native file cache of database cache methodes. Redis is te vergelijken met andere cache backends zoals memcache of apc.

Helvetica, gone

As much as a I liked the design by Rob Krijgsman of the Code Culture logo and style, I was never really keen on the use of Helvetica as the body typeset. Reading this smashing article convinced me to make some changes to the typography of the site. Helvetica seems really stern, and I could really do with a slightly more vivid font. A sans-serif which has a serious tone but which is less formal than Helvetica.

Drupal 7 upgrade

I just finished the update to Drupal 7 for this website. Well, finished, it's a work in progress. Let's say I struggled my way to were the site's now. And it's been a bumpy road. I've played a bit with the betas, the release candidates and the first stable release. But this upgrade is the first truly in depth experience I've had with D7. My impression? The user experience is a lot smoother than it was in previous incarnations of my favorite CMS. However, there is a lot of work to be done still. And the upgrade path is far from smooth.

Joomla-dagen 2010

I'll be attending the Dutch Joomla Days. This year the event takes place on 23rd and 24th of April in Utrecht.