By Ben, on March 9th, 2010%
The company website (www.cibus.co.th) has gone through a number of iterations as I tried to decide the best way to do it. The current iteration runs on Drupal (version 6) and I implemented a limited install of Ubercart in the hope that someday I would fully implement it as a customer portal for ordering products directly. Unfortunately I hit a wall when I discovered that Ubercart only supports integer quantities, a problem when your products are wholesale food, so I put that on hold in the hope that the next version might change that. Now with Drupal 7 drawing closer I’ve seen clearly the direction it will be heading, the team from Ubercart have moved to something else called Drupal Commerce for political reasons, reworking the entire suite from the ground up, so I am having to re-examine the website and plan for the future.
Thus the need to redesign the site from the ground up once more without the use of Ubercart but rather using the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views extensively. Though it will look mostly the same I am switching from using the Zen theme as a base to the Genesis theme. The redesign I am currently working on will enable a clean upgrade to Drupal 7 once it is released, unlike the existing implementation.
In retrospect it was wishful thinking that the company I work for would ever be ready or capable of implementing my plans. The Managing Director has a background in sales and managing restaurants/retail outlets and is a man I have a great deal of respect for, but his background causes him to focus solely on getting the product out to the detriment of everything else and in my whole time here I have never been able to get him to see the wisdom of organising the company operations in a more manageable fashion. If I’m ever asked in a job interview to recount a situation where I could have done better this will be it. I have no hard feelings towards him at all though because were it not for him the company would surely have failed by now, I have only regrets of what I had hoped to achieve.
Continue reading Leaving is Complicated
By Ben, on March 5th, 2010%
I’ve been playing with Drupal 7, creating mock-ups, so that I might move the company website to it when it’s released and so far am impressed with the improvements made.
First and foremost is CCK integration. No longer do I need to install 4 or 5 additional modules just to be able to add images that are . . . → Read More: Playing with Drupal 7
By Ben, on February 2nd, 2010%
You’re working on the company website and suddenly everything is screwed up with the design. What do you do? WHAT – DO – YOU – DO?? If you’re like me you initially blame yourself and eventually discover that a particular directory on your webserver has inexplicably become in accessible via the web.
The problem was exacerbated by . . . → Read More: How to Make a Day Interesting
By Ben, on January 18th, 2010%
Ever tried to set up an email subscription service in Drupal? Until recently I hadn’t and now that I’m in the midst of it I wish email newsletters would all rot in hell. The setup is the easy part. The newsletter is the hard part.
A little thing I never knew is that email clients don’t use . . . → Read More: Email Newsletters are FUN!
By Ben, on December 5th, 2009%
I’ve recently implemented a small change I’m rather proud of to our company website that will automatically display any recipes we have on file that make use of a product you’re viewing. At the moment I’ve only got Texturas recipes so that’s the only thing that will show them, but in time more recipes will mean . . . → Read More: Moments of Cleverness
By Ben, on October 28th, 2009%
I’ve overcome the majority of my problems with IE7 and the page layout is correct, but there is one minor issue remaining.
I have a div named main that contains two divs named content and sidebar. It has nothing else in it. The problem is that main has a background colour and borders that aren’t correctly displaying . . . → Read More: IE7 Quirks
By Ben, on October 21st, 2009%
In building the website for my work I’ve experienced a hiccup or two, but it is up and running (www.cibus.co.th). Since opening it up to customers I’ve disovered that the site doesn’t render correctly in any Internet Explorer below 8, and even that only works in compatability mode.
So the question I’ve been tossing around in my . . . → Read More: To Fix Or Not To Fix
By Ben, on October 14th, 2009%
In this day and age of Google and friends there are certain things you expect when software says it includes search functionality. At the most basic level you expect that if you type in ‘elephant’ it will find all instances of the word ‘elephant’. The next step is that typing ‘free’ would return all instances of . . . → Read More: Search Expectations
By Ben, on September 29th, 2009%
Did you know that if you link more than 30 css stylesheets Internet Explorer won’t recognise anything past the 30th? Neither did I and what a waste of time disocvering that was.
Luckily Drupal has a feature where it can take all of your css files and make them into a single on to save file . . . → Read More: IE Quirks
By Ben, on August 27th, 2009%
While I don’t think I’ve mastered Drupal I’m past the worst of the learning curve, but there were a number of things that I never saw explained anywhere which caused me many a headache. Many a time I would update some css but after uploading and forcing a page refresh the changes wouldn’t appear and I’d spend the next 20-30 minutes trying to see if I’d mispelt something (which is often the case).
Occasionally it would happen that I didn’t make a mistake though leaving me extremely perplexed and thoroughly unconfident in my ability to learn the intricacies of Drupal, only to have my original changes suddenly appear on the site without me doing anything.
Continue reading Drupal’s Steep Learning Curve
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