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Call us: +32 (0) 3 298 69 98

Email us: info@krimson.be

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We’re a team of dedicated web developers joining forces to do cool stuff with Drupal. Whether that means building your new Drupal website from scratch, Drupal training your staff to become Drupal ninjas, or advising you on your latest web project: we’re all yours.

Articles

Towards a perfect Drupal Development Environment.

Below you'll find my slides for the presentation at fosdem 2010

Setting up a new machine to be able to do drupal development often takes a lot of time, googling and tweaking. To ease that process i've created a automated installation process which takes you up to speed in roughly 20 minutes.
The whole installation process is split up in three different steps.

  • Setup Lamp Server
  • Setup Drush
  • Setup Eclipse

These steps have been automated based on a freshly installed Ubuntu 9.04.
Just run the following code and follow the trivial installation steps.

Apache Solr custom sorting

Skip the general crap - give me the details please

Apache Solr is a great solution for implementing faceted search into a Drupal website. (have a quick read on faceted-search and facets if you don't know what we're talking about)
Through the work of Robert Douglas and others Drupal has this functionality virtually out of the box.
Installing a Solr Server can sometimes be a hassle though, so we recommend reading the lucene tutorial or the krimson tutorial prior to the attempt. Or just try the acquia distribution which connects to acquia's farm of solr servers with one click. Thus far the good news.
The problem with current Drupal solution is that it does not yet provide all the power that Apache Solr gives us. We have tackled the fact that it is currently only possible to sort search results on a strict set of only 4 fields (relevancy, title, author, date) which are in fact the only fields common to All nodes.

Ecobouwers.be
ecobouwers.be

Ecobouwers.be is the newest web reference on sustainable construction and renovation in Belgium since April 2009. The famous Forum on Energy of the Belgian environmental coalition "Bond Beter Leefmilieu" has been freshly repackaged and surrounded by innovative and interactive applications.

Ecobouwers.be runs entirely on an active online community that contributes to all of its content. Visit the site today and get involved with do-it-yourselfers and professionals in the industry.

DrupalVillage at DMF 2009 - a big success
Picture of Tasso in Brussels - High quality cooking

On October 22, 2009 - Krimson was present at the Digital Marketing event (DMF09) in Tour & Taxi's, Brussels.

It was an intense day - starting with the Krimson Krew (Jan, Donald and Roel) travelling more than 2 hours from Antwerp to Brussels in traffic jams.

We were just in time to be able to do the presentation "How to lose your client, and make them feel happy about it".

Want to win a grassroots campaign? Use Drupal!
Ademloos Joe

Last Sunday was a very turbulent day for the city of Antwerp, home of the Krimson office and some of the people of our krew. In a referendum, the people from Antwerp could decide pro or contra a huge viaduct (The "Lange Wapper").

Until last year, opposition against the multi-billion works (latest estimation: 2.5 billion euro) was rather limited, until organization Ademloos ('Breathless') started a big grassroots campaign.

Apache Solr Custom Sort

Solr Custom Sort is a module that I made for the Air Miles Project. By default, Apache Solr doesn't allow you to add sort types. Basically, you can only use those that are standard set in advance. For the Air Miles project, this wasn't what we needed. Therefore, I'm now working on the Custom Sort module, a module that allows me to add multiple sort criteria, with the ability to manage them all.
The challenge for me is now to get transparency. Today the module can only be managed by administers but in the future this should be possible for all users.

My first feature: 1 click photo gallery

At Krimson we have been using DevSeeds Open Atrium for a while now as alpha testers. Features, the easy way to add new contenttypes/views/settings to a website are key to the success of Open Atrium. But they are not limited to Open Atrium.
We are currently deploying features as a major part of a framework that requires the fast roll-out of new websites every few weeks. The major part of these websites are simular, but every version needs some different -ahum- features enabled.

Setup Drupal 6.x with Apache Solr on Tomcat6 and Ubuntu

Wow, I spent alot of time to make this guide as simple as possible. This is my second try in making a simple Apache Solr Setup Guide.

One good advice, never use the tomcat or the solr packages from ubuntu or any others...! REALLY!!! It will make a little mess in your filesystem and you can't get control anymore of the paths that are in use.
So if you have a clean server try this to make Apache Solr working

Future Express: a Drupal based international train travel community site (and more)
Screenshot of Slideshow on Dutch FutureExpress site

"Create a site where people can log their international train travels, and show those trails clearly on a map. People should be able to easily add their own photos, videos and blog posts about their travels, and be able to browse other users' content. Include a point system where users with more points are more visible than others. The site should evolve towards an international train travel community site. Oh, and make it all happen within 2 months' time."

Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting

Prentice Hall has just released Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting, authored by Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Käfer. This is a book to teach readers how to customize how Drupal looks, with a special focus on Drupal 6 and its new theme engine. Emma Jane and Konstantin cover everything you need to know to create great visual designs and interactivity with Drupal's behaviors, themes, and templates.