jcfiala

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2012/08/27/useful-drupal-module-stage-drupal-proxy.

Here's a useful module that I keep forgetting the name of, so I wanted to note it down: Stage File Proxy. It's not something you use for a live site, it's something you use while developing.

The basic idea is this: you're working on a site that's since gone live, making changes for the client. It's easy enough to get a copy of the database, but the files can be a pain to keep replacing, interlacing test files with live images. Stage File Proxy fixes this by snooping in on imagecache and, when a file is missing, then it grabs it off of the live site, copies it to the local directory, and then you've got the file locally and all your imagecache files get generated for you!

There's a version for six and for seven, and there's no ui for it yet, although there is a patch for it. Then again, once you've got the simple settings done, you don't need to worry about them again!

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2011/07/12/multigrid-webform-component.

(I originally wrote this for G+, but since it's long enough, I'm making it a blog post too.)

So, I'm making a new component for webform in Drupal, called 'Multigrid'. It's based on the grid component, which if you don't remember it, allows you to define a set of common options (like, neutral, dislike, hate beyond rational thought) and define a set of questions, and then it sets up a grid of radio buttons, where the answers are across the top and the questions go along the left side.

If you're picturing the online survey you filled out recently in the mistaken hope that you might win $500 after eating at sit-down-chain-restaurant-326, then that's pretty much it.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2011/06/12/drupalcamp-colorado-2011-success.

It's been a very long week to me leading up to Drupal Camp Colorado, but it's been a successful and satisfying one. Over the weekend I complained a few times at people not to let me run three presentations, but honestly, I loved it! Really, I quite like standing in front of folks and trying to teach them something I'm passionate about, and I was lucky enough to do it three times. I may not get to do that again, really - with the way the Drupal community is growing these days in Colorado, more and more people will be available to step up and help out with sessions like this.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2011/05/13/drupal-7-if-new-fieldinstance-isnt-working.

Something useful sounding from #drupal-colorado:

<cyberswat> drush php-eval '_field_info_collate_fields(TRUE); _field_info_collate_fields()' ... arrrrrggggghhhh /me curses loudly
<cyberswat> should never have to run that
<cyberswat> c4rl: if you ever have an instance where your installing new fields and instances and every piece of code tells you that everything worked from the update hook but you still don't see the instance then run the above
<cyberswat> that took between 4:00am and now to figure out

<cyberswat> for some reason field_cache_clear(); in field_create_instance() didn't do the above as it should have
<cyberswat> field_read_instances() reads from the db not cache
<cyberswat> so when your drush_print_r ing away you'll see wrong information telling you everything is golden

This sounds like an important thing to remember.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2011/02/26/compiling-git.

So, I like working on Drupal in virtual machines, and my favorite is to use Ubuntu 8.04, because it's got PHP 5.2.x, which Drupal 6 works with better than it does PHP 5.3.x. Unfortunately, the git that Ubuntu provides us with is from 1.5.x, which doesn't allow use of git clone --branch. And the git
instructions seem to require those. What to do? Happily, you can compile git yourself:

1. First, get rid of git if you've already installed it - sudo apt-get remove git-core should do that.
2. apt-get install build-essential
3. Download the latest version of git. http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.7.4.1.tar.bz2 works currently.
4. sudo apt-get build-dep git-core
5. tar xjf git-1.7.4.1.tar.bz2 (or whichever version you downloaded)
6. Change directive into the new directory.
7. ./configure
8. make

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2010/12/29/upgrade-note-going-migrate-6x-20-beta2-6x-20-beta3.

I'm currently in the midst of setting up a migration from a pretty huge MS SQL database to Drupal, in D6. This migration not only involves Microsoft SQL Server, as I mentioned, but it also involves using mongodb, so we're basically touching three different databases here.

So, I've been using the 2.0 branch of Migrate for 6.x, because I was curious about seeing it again, and I know it worked quite well for Examiner. (Yes, they were doing Drupal 7, but it was still the same basic idea.) It's been going very well.

Today I updated to the 6.x-2.0-beta3 version of the code, and I had to make a couple small changes to my existing module. I'm reproducing them here, in hopes that it can prevent others from having trouble like I did.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2010/06/28/dcco10-code-and-presentation-building-solr-search.

Here's where I'm posting the various files that I promised to deliver - these are the files I used in my DrupalCamp Colorado 2010 presenation on extending Solr.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2010/04/19/drupalcon-sf-first-day-thoughts.

The sheer size of Drupal, and of DrupalconSF, was brought rudely to your attention as you walked into exhibit hall A, which looked to be about the size of room you would need to store a few decently sized airplanes, and saw the rows and rows of chairs set out for people to sit back and hear Dries talk about the State of Drupal.

In short, he thinks it's doing pretty good.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2010/03/05/ie6-funeral.

So, last night here in Denver was the original ie6Funeral party, and I showed up. There was a lot of booze, a lot of really tasty snacks - Forest Room 5 did a fine job there - and finally, there were remembrances. And here's the one I came up with:

Now, there's a bunch of others that my friend Matthew Saunders posted on his blog, so if you want to see more about the funeral, and see a picture of the deceased, I suggest heading there. It was a lot of fun.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/10/04/freelancing-early-days.

A little over three weeks ago i set into motion my big gamble - stepping away from pingVision, and starting life as a freelance consultant. I'm not really able to go into all of the reasons, but partially it's a test - can I go out on my own and find my own way, without a company supporting what I do?

And, so far it's launched very nicely. My first client has been SpireMedia, here in downtown Denver, where I've been assisting them with an ubercart site with a large number of customizations, starting with working in three currencies and custom shipping costs, moving all the way to some interesting ways of presenting and offering discounts... which have already lead to one patch for uc_discounts_alt, and probably leading to more later.