A little while back ideograph launched mollycrealock.com – a nice, attractive gallery for commercial Toronto photographer, Molly Crealock. It was a challenge to meet the requirements of automatic circular thumbnail generation and custom positioning.

The site also incorporates:

• private client galleries visible based on either user role or user names.
• Multiple simultaneous file uploads.
• Easy image captions and re-ordering of galleries through drag & drop.
• jQuery interface elements

You can see more screen shots of the work on ideograph.ca

You can use it to connect to your local MAMP and also to remote LAMP mysql servers (via SSH). Why is this so awesome?

Well, not only is it 100 times faster than that phpMyAdmin, but you can edit your DB super easily, like a spreadsheet. It is a snap to filter/search/order a table for viewing and editing.

Caveat emptor: what I am about to show you can do tremendous damage. You can accidentally kill your entire application, so BACK YOUR DATABASES UP! Test on a copy first.

You can do simple things like turn 1′s to 0′s and quickly disable a drupal module faster than drush can (but watch out if you don’t know your dependencies).

Edit your system table in Sequel Pro

I had this interesting and daunting problem:
I am working on this site for a soccer league that has a couple hundred teams and I realize that I need to modify a whole slew of node titles based on values that appear in their CCK fields.
Many of the Organic Group Group nodes (each team is a group)
Views Bulk Operations gets me part, but not all the way quickly enough for this one-time operation.

I’m not crafty enough to write a join and update statement across all these tables, but I do already have a view listing Teams and CCK fields for Division and Type.

Hey, if I scroll down to the bottom of the view, I can copy the query right from views into Sequel Pro!

Holy Moly. It just works. As it should.

Edit the result of a sequel statement created with views

Now I can just go down the list and edit my node titles.
Sweet.

Because there was a pattern here, I ended up using  the fabulous auto nodetitle module and tokens. I temporarliy added a pattern to the node titles of my team content type and used views bulk operations to update some of my node titles. After the update, i set the pattern to be used only if the title was blank.

Even though I solved my use case another way, I can see plenty of use for this technique in the future. Great way to fix typos in content, for example.

Commonly, users need to create subheadings in their posts. Markup should always be privileged over wrapping content in classes. For example, it is much better, both from a structural and a maintenance perspective, to use an h2 tag to create a title, rather than adding a class of, say, .title to a paragraph tag, then forcing the paragraph to look like an h2. It will make a mess of your stylesheet, plus render your site less accessible to screen readers and search engines.

It is most often advisable to create a new Input profile called “Rich Text” or “Graphical HTML Editor”, but we can also edit the “Full HTML” input format.

Our wysiwyg profiles will be listed at  [ /admin/settings/wysiwyg/profile ]  where we edit the profile to which we’ve assigned the TinyMCE editor. Under Buttons and plugins, we enable the following buttons:

1. HTML block format
2. Font style
3. Source code (not necessary, but useful for checking what we’ve done)

Under the CSS fieldset, we limit the number of block tags available, i.e.

  p,h2,h3,h4

and set the Editor CSS to use the theme CSS. By default, this will generate a lot list of classes from our theme’s style.css. Now, you can create a separate stylesheet just for the wysiwyg, but coordinating changes across them can be a hassle. Instead, we open up only a subset of the classes in our stylesheet using the CSS classes textarea, following the [title]=[class] format (this will seem familiar if you’ve ever used webform module):

  intro text=intro
  description text=description
  read more link=more-link

This is great because we can now provide a more meaningful list of styles to the user, and also a limited set of structural markup tags. The downside is that we have 2 dropdown lists and have to provide the tiniest bit of eduction.

I’m going to show you how to use phpMyAdmin to back up and restore MySQL databases. In my next post, I’ll show you how to graduate to doing the same thing using the command line.

I use MAMP to develop websites locally. I’ve written about this before here. The examples I’ll be showing come from the phpMyAdmin packaged with MAMP, but apply just as well to any other environment.

phpMyAdmin without the MAMP frame

First things first. Let’s work so we can see what we’re doing.I’m going to assume that you’re able to download and install MAMP or MAMP Pro on your own. The phpMyAdmin URL that you from the MAMP default webstart page gets you to the URL:

http://localhost/MAMP/frame.php?src=%2FphpMyAdmin%2F%3Flang%3Den-iso-8859-1&language=English

which looks gives you a framed version of the phpMyAdmin. The framing takes up a lot of screen real estate.

Instead, use http://localhost/phpMyAdmin and you’ll get something that looks much more pleasing:

dumping a database with phpMyAdmin

Select a database from the drop-down menu on the left hand side of phpMyAdmin. Or, Navigate to “home” by clicking the little house under the phpMyAdmin logo in the top left and hit the blue Databases link in the longish list there.

Ok, so now we see the tables in our database. Press the Export tab at the top. We’re going to export this database.

Let’s review the options you should select to get nice, compact, and legible SQL.

The first column, in the Export fieldset, is pretty straight forward. By default all the tables in your database will be selected. SQL is the format you want too.

“Disable foreign key checks” isn’t always necessary. I do a lot of CiviCRM work. Restoring a CiviCRM database will fail unless this option is enabled in your export.

“Add DROP TABLE / DROP VIEW” will delete your table on import before recreating it.

Extended inserts and Complete insterts gives you a smaller file and more compacted, easy to read view.

Click “Save as file” and use “gzipped” compression for the smallest files.

In the File name template, I add %D, which spits out today’s date. I add a little hypen before to seperate it from the database name and MAMP after, so I know it was a local dump and not from my live server. This format would give me a file like: mysql-06_02_09_MAMP.sql.gz

To restore your databse, click on the import tab, click the browse button, select your file, press go. I’ll spare you the screenshot.

http://thespringweddingshow.com

An innovative project conceived as a walk in the park. (Pulling it off was another story). Working with Brooklyn-based designers Mélngerie, and Toronto-based animators 3Di, and featuring a soundscape by composer Nicholas Longstaff, the project is a time-limited online wedding tradeshow.

The interface promotes exploration and discovery by creating a whimsical lanscape, while simultaneously making quickly accessible information to those seeking it.

A Drupal 6 site with a  Flash-based front-end + Drupal back-end, featuring Lightbox2/Thickbox implementations. I’m proud of how un-drupal this drupal site is.

Screenshots don’t do this project justice. The innovative interface, and animations set this project apart. I’m going to try to post a video showing the site navigation soon.

I’ve been doing work implementing and configuring  CiviCRM. Joe, the principal JMA, is on the advisory board, and many of his clients leverage this solution to manage their constituents.

I’ve also been doing a lot of sysadmin work: Linux server administration, Subversion repository managment, etc. Generally, I figure things out; make things work. I’m enjoying not being the lead on every project I work on, and it’s helping me achieve more balance in my life, I think.

I’ve been working with a really fantastic organization, Techsoup Canada, on helping them launch their new site. They do really amazing work connecting non-profits and Charities to technologies that they might otherwise not afford.

Techsoup Global was founded in 1987 by a couple of guys in a station wagon, who went around collecting all the freebee software sent to publication for review and re-allocating it to organizations in need. These robin hoods of silicon valley eventually grew the organization to the point where, in 2008, they were receiving annually tech donation worth 312$ Million.

The real beauty here is that Techsoup has become more than just a great enabler – connecting organizations to a myriad of corporate donation programs in a centrally administered repository. Their success has mad them an important advocate for the non-profit sector.

For years, Techsoup has served the needs of Canadian NGO’s and NFP’s through their San Francisco office. Establishing a Toronto base of operations will allow the organization to better administer the intricacies of Canadian donation programs, and to support the language needs of French Canada. Techsoup Canada is the result of a collaboration between the Centre for Social Innovation,  the Information Technology Association of Canada, and the Trillium Foundation.

Working on the website has posed numerous challenges. Namely, coordinating workflows between a development team in Poland, the San Fransico office, and Toronto. Drupal has always been challenged when facing the dev-staging-production workflow, but I haven’t faced butted up against it this much before. The Drupal community desperately needs to smartly seperate database content from configuration, and develop better logging and migration toolkits.