As most techies and programmers have heard, the Drupal CMS is an extremely flexible, dynamic, scaleable, and extendable platform. However, when it comes to running e-Commerce, the field is filled with competing systems that challenge the Drupal framework (Magento, osCommerce, OpenCart, Spree, Zen Cart, etc.) and push it to some possibly unforeseen limits. The question is, [...]

A web developer, especially one who focuses on Drupal, has to have a stable platform on which to work in order to be the most productive. After many years of struggling to find the right combination of hardware manufacturer, operating system, software, integrated development environment (IDE), and server operating system, VM Ware came to the [...]

Drupal’s default search technique periodically processes all new content and stores keywords and keyword details in separate database tables (search_*). This allows Drupal to run searches by investigating exact matches on the search_index table alone and reviewing pre-calculated scores therein. Searching exact word matches in a dedicated table (search_index) is much faster in MySQL (and [...]

All it takes is 12 steps to get you running with a bootable USB drive.  If you’d like to go straight to the instructions for the Bootable USB drive, click here. This past weekend I spent some time playing around with Linux Mint 12. Last week, Linux Mint’s approach to the Gnome2-Gnome3-Unity fiasco was highlighted [...]

Web technologies are always improving, and at an enormous rate. The web is moving in a way that makes it possible to do things natively in the web browser where one once had to rely only on external scripts or images. This is a very exciting concept to modern web designers and front-end developers. Things [...]

Last week we launched a mobile version of our website. While it is not the full site, it gives users on a mobile device a quick overview of our services and capabilities as well as an easy way to contact us directly from their mobile phone. Clicking on the image to the right will take [...]

After a couple of hours of hair pulling over a few lines of rewrite instructions for apache, my search for inaccurate regular expressions or logic ended with this bug report in the debian community. I’m sure this bug is addressed in some upstream distributions, and I’m also sure it’s not a critical issue, because there [...]

The goal of any Content Managements System (CMS) should be to allow the content managers to create as many pages as they like without deviating from the original website design. Much of this can be done with carefully planned out cascading style sheets (css) and restricting the wysiwyg editor to the standard html formats such [...]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 ships with PHP 5.1, and also makes PHP 5.3 available. PHP 5.1 is the default, and the server will never update from 5.1 to 5.3 without being explicitly configured to do so. But you may notice that glaring hole where PHP 5.2 should be. Where does that leave users of [...]

XML is a markup language similar to HTML. It was designed to transport data. Once data has been enoded, it can be easily read by many different systems. As a result, it is widely used in web services to transfer data. Recently, I was working on a web service which required us to parse the [...]