Technical articles

Mailchimp, group names and merge tags

Friday, 15 July 2011

Lately, I've been working on a Drupal project which involves Mailchimp integration. Mailchimp is an excellent service which manages all the monkeyjobs while you can send out newsletters to lists of subscribers carefree. The service allows you to create a (or use a predefined) reusable template for your newsletter. You pass the content which needs to be sent out on a frequent (weekly? monthly?) basis to your subscribers to Mailchimp and it will churn out a new newsletter based on your template.

Drupal coding speed tips, using an IDE

Tuesday, 01 February 2011

Do you use PHP print statements (and the Devel module) to inspect variables? Do you use php.net and api.drupal.org to search for information on certain functions? Guess what. You can do things much faster. Follow along and imagine what you could do with the time you win...

HTML5 + (aging browser - JS) = show stopper?

Tuesday, 25 January 2011

Here at krimson, we are working on our own super-duper start-theme. (Who's not, right?) In that quest for our holy grail, I did find some interesting tips and tricks I want to share. You've certainly heard about HTML5, and the new semantics this provides us. If you haven't, have a look at the magnificent keynote from Jeremy Keith at Drupalcon Copenhagen, called 'The design of HTML5'. At one brave day, I started to build a drupal theme, based on those new HTML5 elements. Very soon, a problem became clear: older browsers don't support those new semantic tags.

Seven improvements for end users in Drupal 7

Monday, 03 January 2011

It has been officially announced that January 5th 2011 will be etched in our memory as the release date of Drupal 7.0. This will introduce many of improvements for everyone: developers, themers, system administrators and end users. Time to take a look at 7 improvements that Drupal 7 brings for end users.

Riding the Semweb: the Toneelstof case

Monday, 13 December 2010

A few weeks back, we blogged about the Semantic Web and how it will gain more importance in day-to-day life. We've seen how the lack of easy-to-use tools to leverage its power is keeping it from becoming mainstream and saw how Drupal fits in the story. And so Krimson, in an effort to bring the semweb in Drupal, takes part in a Flemish government-sponsored research project called Archipel.

Migrating content from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6

Tuesday, 19 October 2010

Every once in a while, you have to update a Drupal website. With such an upgrade comes the task of migrating the content to the upgraded site. If you're lucky, you can simply follow the upgrade path. For one of our latest projects, however, we felt it would be better to rebuild the complete site in Drupal 6. This meant we had to find a way to export and import all the content (including all the files) and all the users from the old to the new site.

Surfing the Semantic Web

Wednesday, 06 October 2010

May you live in interesting times. This ancient proverb isn't far off these days. In this last decade, the Web has become ubiquitous in our daily lives. It has become far more then just a digital library of HTML pages. It's a virtual space where people meet, communicate and interact. The unseen expansion and evolution of the Web has spawned vast quantities of data distributed over countless server clusters, domains, databases,...

Kennislabo toerisme Limburg: a Drupal based knowledge sharing tool

Friday, 01 October 2010

An initiative of Toerisme Limburg, the tourism sector organisation of Limburg, Belgium, the KennisLabo website aims to collect and distribute information & data about Limburg's tourism infrastructure. How many rooms were booked during a certain period of a certain year? What kind of accomodation do tourists prefer in spring or summer? What places do they like to visit? The Kennislabo website is able to collect this kind of information quickly and in a simple & user friendly way. And to feed relevant information back to the people working in Limburg's tourism industry.

Pushing the envelope with Display Suite: leveraging Views.

Wednesday, 11 August 2010

In the first article of our series, we introduced Display Suite and showed how it allows you to easily visualize nodes and fields without writing any code. Just like Panels, Display Suite is one of those indispensable tools for Drupalistas who are fed up with hacking templates to do stuff which shouldn't be that complicated. If you haven't heard of Display Suite already, check out the project page!

Pushing the envelope with Display Suite

Thursday, 01 July 2010

If you've done the odd Drupal job, you're probably familiar with Drupal's build modes. A build mode defines the way Drupal builds and presents a node to the user. Drupal core comes with a few default build modes such as 'Teaser' and 'Full node'. If you want to step sideways and - depending on the context - need extra display variants for a node (in blocks, in views, full pages,...) you'll probably end up falling back on Drupal's template suggestions. But even when you're careful, it's an easy road to perdition, clogging your theme with more template files (Views templating anyone?). Not to mention the hairy CSS you're forced to write. No more. These days, there are solutions which make life a tad easier.