We love WordPress for blogs and simple presentation sites. While we prefer Drupal for more complex projects, WordPress is simpler and faster for basic projects as has a friendlier admin interface to boot. On top of that, WordPress has more themes available compared to Drupal themes.
There are many free and affordable WordPress themes available as well as good providers of theming services. But often you want something a bit more customized and unique. If you know some basic HTML and CSS, these guides and tutorials can help you do everything from small modifications to building your own theme from scratch:
Guides and Tutorials
http://wpshout.com/wordpress-theme-design-basics/
http://wpshout.com/wordpress-theme-design-basics/
http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
WordPress theming frameworks
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/27/wordpress-theme-development-frameworks/
Simple Wordpress theme generator – as a starting point
http://www.yvoschaap.com/wpthemegen/
WordPress tutorial videos (theming and others)
http://sixrevisions.com/wordpress/30-excellent-wordpress-video-tutorials/
The iPhone 4 features a gyroscope for the first time (which is much more sensitive than the old accelerometer based motion sensor). This leads not only to much improved gaming but also a less jerky augmented reality experience.
The iPhone apps, however, have to be rewritten to take advantage of the new sensor. AcrossAir has done just that and posted a comparison video of the new improved AR experience.
How well does the gyroscope work for gaming? Take a look at the first iPhone 4 gyroscope game. Another video of “Gun Range” here.
As we rely more and more on Drupal for our Web projects, theming becomes an increasingly larger part of our development process. Everyone wants a site that looks and feels unique and professional. Luckily, there many resources available for Drupal theming if you don’t have as much time or are on a tighter budget:
Free Drupal Themes
TripWire: 225+ Ultimate Drupal Theme collection (good complication of free and paid Drupal themes from many sources – easy to browse)
Top Drupal Themes (large selection of relatively nice themes, good navigation)
Free Drupal Themes (.net) (good selection and navigation)
Free Drupal Themes (.com) (simpler themes but offer live demos so you can see the site in aciton)
ThemeBot – Free Drupal Themes (varying success)
Drupal.org 6.x theme listing (large selection, varying quality, [...]
I recently came across some beautiful Web graphics done without the use of any images, done purely in HTML 5 and CSS 3. I thought I’d share these little nuggets with you:
Jeff Batterton: iPhone World clock without images in CSS3
Graphicpeel: iOS Icons in Pure CSS
David DeSandro: Opera Logo with CSS
Rather Splendid: Pure CSS Icons
David DeSandro: CSS SpeechBubble
10 Steps.SG: Cool Curtis Typeface Built with Pure CSS
Canvas cycling: amazing HTML5 only animations
The examples work best in HTML5/CSS3 compliant browsers, ideally Safari 5 and Chrome 5, and to a lesser extent in Firefox and Opera. Don’t bother looking at these with Internet Explorer.
If you have any more examples of pure CSS, post them in the comments!
There are many different aspects to tuning Apache. In this post, I will focus on tuning which modules are compiled into Apache and also dynamically enabled. The more modules you have enabled, the more memory Apache will consume and the more processing it needs to perform; try to enable the minimum amount of modules required on your Web server to improve performance and reduce memory consumption:
1) First, list which Apache modules you have enabled on your server:
apache2 -l — this will list all the compiled in modules
a2dismod — this will list all dynamically loaded modules
2) Decide which modules you can disable and disable them:
For the compiled in modules, the list for the compiled modules in Ubuntu’s Apache web server will look something like [...]
I am excited for the upcoming Drupalcamp in Timisoara, Romania. My team and I are going to showcase some of the newest Drupal modules we developed for our latest project, Urbo – a business directory focused on Romania.
Part of the project is our new login system, called OpenForis. It will allows users to keep a single identity across our growing network of sites. We are also leveraging OpenLayers to give us the best of OpenStreetMaps, Bing, Yahoo and Google Maps. Urbo is currently in beta as we are tweaking the last few details for an official launch. We are hoping to post some Drupal training videos about these modules on our Drupal training videos page soon.
For our latest project, Urbo.ro, I needed to find the largest image file (.jpg) in a big directory structure with 50,000+ images but also other files in it. Manually searching it would have been impossible. I turned to our Linux ninja, Alexandru Ionica, who came up with the following that I wanted to share:
find /directory/ -iname “*.extension” -printf “%s ” -print | sort -n -r | head -n1
This Linux snippet give you the largest file that ends with .extension inside of whichever directory structure you specify. To search the whole file system, just specify /.
We recently noticed that MySQL does not work for WHERE queries with TRIM like:
UPDATE tablename SET column = TRIM(column) WHERE column != TRIM(column)
Technically a query like this is unnecessary, you can just TRIM directly.
But say you wanted to do a SELECT since you need to do something else with those records. This does not work:
SELECT * FROM tablename WHERE column != TRIM(column)
We found an simple workaround for this this MySQL shortcoming. Just use:
SELECT * FROM tablename WHERE CHAR_LENGTH(column) != CHAR_LENGTH( TRIM(column) )
Unmounting disks in Ubuntu is a bit more challenging than it should be. Say you have an external drive mounted on /media/disk. Trying the standard
sudo umount /media/disk
will often result in an error such as
umount: /media/drive: device is busy.
It is advisable to check what files may be open on the drive with
lsof | grep /media/disk
If something important is still open on the disk, make sure to close the files or programs using the disk. If nothing else should be keeping the disk busy, you can usually achieve an unmount with
sudo umount -vl /mnt/external_disk
This performs a verbose, lazy unmount – i.e. Ubuntu unmounts the disk drive when the device is no longer busy, showing any errors in the unmount if there are any.
To confirm [...]
Did you ever want to securely erase a hard disk on your server so the data is unrecoverable? Maybe you are selling the drive or the computer and want to be sure that no sensitive data can be recovered by a future owner. Ubuntu has a command line tool for just that purpose. If you want to completely erase the drive your system is on, first boot your computer using a Ubuntu LiveCD or the server install disk. Then, from the terminal (located in Applications->Accessories->Terminal if you use the Desktop LiveCD) enter the shred:
sudo shred -vfz -n [times] [your hard drive]
For example, you could type
sudo shred -vfz -n 5 /dev/sda
This would overwrite the data on the drive in /dev/sda with [...]
