duvien's blog

Making Drupal Admin UI feel a little like Wordpress

Posted Sun, 13/06/2010 - 16:14 by duvien

Recently, i've had a few requests from design companies asking how they can make Drupal Admin UI feel a little like Wordpress because a lot of their clients have become accustom to using Wordpress admin UI and is comfortable with administering their site with a separation of the front and backend. However, these design companies are trying to move away from Wordpress and offer Drupal as a long term solution. Furthermore, the design companies didn't want me to spend a lot of time customizing Drupal so that the admin UI is a bit more like Wordpress. read more »

Getting started with Drupal(con)

Posted Tue, 20/04/2010 - 01:29 by duvien

This is an excellent first impression/introduction to Drupal and it's community for those that are new or are curious about this open source project. read more »

Book review: Drupal for Education and E-Learning by Bill Fitzgerald

Posted Fri, 12/03/2010 - 00:09 by duvien

I was really excited when I received this book 'Drupal for Education and E-Learning' from Packt Publishing because I was about to embark on a re-design of a university website and from the given title of the book, it seems to fit what I wanted to know. read more »

Time to pick a winner for the Drupal site Blueprints book giveway

Posted Tue, 23/02/2010 - 21:43 by duvien

Okay, i've randomly picked out a winner and for the Drupal site Blueprints...

congratulations! pierrelbz was the chosen winner.

You will be contacted on Twitter, please reply to receive your free book.

How did i pick the winner:
To decide who gets the free book each new followers' names on my Twitter list was written on a piece of paper and folded up, then shuffled around in a box. Without looking into the box, I then proceeded to pick out a random name.

Thanks to all that followed me.

Free Book giveaway: Drupal 6 Site Blueprints

Posted Tue, 16/02/2010 - 12:01 by duvien

The lovely Packt Publishing has given me a free book to giveaway. The book is Drupal 6 Site Blueprints.

To enter all you need to do is follow me on Twitter. Simple as that and i'll randomly select a winner from the list.

This contest starts from today and will end on the 23rd Feb (next Tuesday), that's one week from today.

Good luck to everyone.

Note: Winners from the UK will receive a printed copy. All other countries will receive a downloadable PDF version.

Book Review: Drupal 6 Site Blueprint by Timi Ogunjobi

Posted Tue, 29/12/2009 - 22:05 by duvien

Drupal 6 Site Blueprint by Timi Ogunjobi is a hands on practical examples of building 12 different sites. This book is actually very useful if you are starting out with Drupal for the first time. As anyone can tell you with the abundant of modules available it takes a long time to familiarise yourself with which module to choose to get the job done, as well as the time it takes to test them out. read more »

Book Review: Drupal 6 Social Networking by Michael Peacock

Posted Tue, 29/12/2009 - 18:49 by duvien

Ask around any Open Source community and you'll get a positive response that Drupal is a very flexible platform to build social networking sites. But with any powerful and highly configurable CMS there will inevitably be a steep learning curve.

This is where this book Drupal 6 Social Networking by Michael Peacock aims to compliment Drupal by lowering the barrier and learning curve so any one with very little programming knowledge can build their own social network site. So does this book really live up to its expectations and teach many site builders the easy way of setting up a social network? read more »

Is Drupal a desginers' nightmare or it's just not ready for them yet?

Posted Wed, 07/10/2009 - 15:08 by duvien

Image taken from Barnoz

Recently, there has been a lot of debate in the Drupal community surrounding the questions of "Is Drupal for developers only?" and "How we can get more designers involved?". It's a passionate subject for many who want to see further growth in the community and wider acceptance from both developers and designers to the end-users. read more »

Setting up virtual host on local machine running MAMP 1.8.2

Posted Tue, 08/09/2009 - 23:15 by duvien

MAMP 1.8.2 has been released and all is looking good. So what's been updated in this package:

compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
Apache 2.0.63
MySQL 5.1.37
PHP 4.4.9 & 5.2.10
APC 3.0.19 & APC 3.1.2
eAccelerator 0.9.5.3
XCache 1.2.2
phpMyAdmin 2.11.9.5 & phpMyAdmin 3.2.0.1
Zend Optimizer 3.3.3

The rest of the info can be found here: Version History (MAMP) read more »

Drupal Magento integration or is it partial integration?

Posted Thu, 13/08/2009 - 21:26 by duvien

I've been testing out the recent release of a Drupal module created by Adyax that allows for a 3rd party ecommerce system called Magento to be fully integrated into Drupal. But was it really a full integration?

One of the reason why i was excited to try this out is because at my previous job we were using Magento almost exclusively to build online shops because it was fully featured to run any type of online store. Even better, it allows for multiple stores from one installation without the need for a multi-site setup. Magento has certainly been one of the most exciting open source ecommerce application to hit the Internet last year causing a huge buzz and interest. Now with over a million downloads and top brand names using it, it's certainly is living up to its expectations. read more »

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