A New Concept in Web Development Services

Posted Mon, 2009-02-23 23:35 by Andy Sharples

Qanguru.com (pronounced Kangaroo.com) is a company of six Boy Scouts on their way to Eagle, led by a manager with over 20 years of web development and software engineering experience.

We listen carefully to your needs and build sites that enable you to connect with your user community, clients, and constituents.

Maintenance and webmaster support is standard with every qanguru.com deployment:

  • Nightly backups
  • Monitoring for security and module updates
  • Monthly email report featuring:

Node management script

Posted Mon, 2011-07-18 15:11 by Andy Sharples

The attached script skeleton will enable you to do direct manipulation of Drupal 6 nodes. You can use it as a starter for doing stuff on your site. Be sure to save the script somewhere safe in case you want to re-use it after a Drupal update.

Easy recipe for posting events with signups on your website

Posted Tue, 2011-07-12 12:06 by Andy Sharples

You want to create events on your website that users can sign up for? Here's a step-by-step guide:

  1. Install and enable required modules:
    • CCK: Content, Number, Option widgets, Text, User reference
    • calendar: Calendar, Calendar iCal
    • date: Date, Date API, Date Popup, Date Repeat API, Date Timezone IMPORTANT: If your site is running php 5.3, the 6.x-2.7 version won't work.

Handling PDO:_construct error on XAMPP

Posted Mon, 2011-02-07 19:49 by Andy Sharples

Drupal 7 now uses php data objects (PDO). The configuration file sites/default/settings.php now has lots of fanciness to support the variety of ways that it's possible to connect to a variety of databases.

If you're on XAMPP and you get a PDO:_construct error, I'll bet it's the unix socket. Here's the fix. Locate the section that specifies your database, username, and password, and add a 'unix_socket' line like below.


$databases = array (
'default' =>
array (
'default' =>
array (
'database' => 'database_name',

Merit badges and counselors for Boy Scout site

Posted Mon, 2011-02-07 15:17 by Andy Sharples

How do you make a functional merit badge counseling section on a troop website? Boy Scout troops have some degree of turnover in both adults and scouts. Plus, merit badge counselors need to be registered with the district. And, ideally, they should have received training to be merit badge counselors as well.

Easy Recipe for a photo gallery with a slideshow block

Posted Sun, 2010-07-11 21:17 by Andy Sharples

Background

You have an active online community (your scout troop or church) where members are taking photos at events. You want to collect those photos into various photo albums and also make them available in a block on your other pages. Here's a quick step-by-step recipe.

  1. Download, install, enable the modules you'll need: CCK, Views, FileField, ImageField, ImageAPI, ImageCache, Views Slideshow
  2. Create a "photo" content type. Rename the title field "caption". Add a field called "photo".

How much should a website cost?

Posted Sun, 2010-04-18 15:04 by Andy Sharples

I was about to write my own post on this subject when I found a great write-up at http://www.solosignal.com/how-much-should-web-site-design-development-an....

It's a couple years old, but only one thing has changed. The low-end hosting cost has gone from $15/month to $5/month. Other than that, it's a terrific article that helps potential clients understand why website design and development can seem a little pricey.

From "Brochureware" to "Communityware"

Posted Sat, 2010-04-17 19:12 by Andy Sharples

Companies, churches, clubs want their websites to be effective advertisement. The website has to look great. It has to be distinctive, so that the organization is seen as clever, creative, and interesting. We want visitors to be hooked.

That's “brochureware.” You can get a free brochureware website that looks OK. And for a few dollars a month, you can get a website that looks pretty good. What the free and cheap website providers don’t tell you is that successful brochureware depends on marketing savvy: great graphics and captivating writing.

rgrep

Posted Fri, 2009-07-10 13:09 by Andy Sharples

Here's a very helpful recursive grep commandline script I use on OSX and Linux all the time.

To use, just cd to the starting directory and type rgrep string. This will find all occurrences of "string" in the starting directory and any of its subdirectories.

Copy the code below and write it to a file called 'rgrep'. Make sure rgrep is somewhere in your path. (Maybe under ~/bin.)


#!/usr/bin/perl
$| = 1;
my ($str) = @ARGV;
if (!$str) {
die "Syntax: $0 {str} # finds {str} starting in current dir.\n";
}

Why build websites using Drupal?

Posted Tue, 2009-02-24 17:59 by Andy Sharples

Drupal is a highly modular, open-source Content Management System (CMS) that enables communities of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on their own websites. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power community web portals, discussion sites, corporate web sites, intranet applications, and e-commerce applications.

High profile Drupal-based websites include:

Government:
Belgium, New Zealand, US www.recovery.gov
Education:
Harvard, Cornell, MIT, Sun Microsystems Learning Exchange

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