// sime

Carbon Down retrospective

Earlier this year, Em Space implemented Drupal for the Beta version of the Compass website for the Victorian Employers Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VECCI).

This is a brief wrap-up of the site (not a lengthy case-study), plus some feedback about the positive role that Lullabot played in the project.

Administer Users - the sledgehammer permission

Do you give out the Administer Users permission on your Drupal websites? Did you know it's just as dangerous as Administer Permissions, as dangerous as giving access to User 1?

Imagine: you're about to go live. The client calls up, he wants to create users for everyone in the office. Even though the client is not a 100% trusted user (since no-one is), there is an easy solution for this: Administer Users.

Indeed, unless you implement some contributed modules, this is THE solution provided by Drupal core... Wait, read on!

Drupal à la carte

Em Space can now be booked to come to your office anywhere in Australia and train your team in Drupal. We provide the following equipment:
  • A server that provides the training/development environment
  • Ad hoc wireless/wired network
  • Optionally, setting up your website on the server
  • Projector
  • (For up to 2 trainees without laptops,) netbooks pre-configured with the tools you'll need to learn Drupal development
  • One complimentary Drupal book for every trainee

Blood, sweat and mlids: rendering menus in Drupal 6

Drupal 6 menu system is a big improvement over Drupal 5. Of course, it's new, and like any major rewrite it will take a few iterations to reach its peak.

I struggled recently with the menu system in a website upgrade from Drupal 5. And again rending fiddly table of contents for a site that uses the book module. What I really miss, as with Drupal 5 before it, are some really nice API functions for building, manipulating and rendering menu structures that are defined in the menu_links table.

So, this tutorial explains how to tackle the Drupal 6 menu system to generate the HTML for a subset of a menu. If you are familiar with nice_menus, that module has some helper functions for similar things.

jQuery Glue Code setup

This article describes how to set up a custom JavaScript file in your theme in preparation for writing simple jQuery "glue code".

What is Glue Code

There is a fairly common practice in Drupal site development called writing "glue code". The idea is that, when developing a site, there will be a number of simple custom behaviors or workflow steps that you need to configure. Most of the time there is a module to achieve individual requirements, but the risk is that you can end up with a lot of extra code of dubious performance or quality akin to the Open Buffet Syndrome.

Drupal-friendly room for Hire

We've been in our city office for a few months now. One of the big benefits is the location, and the ability to bring together teams in one place, for development, Drupal meetups, training or just for project brain-storming or client meetings. We are now offering our best room for hire to other companies, especially in the open source or Drupal space.

Drupal training in Australia

I'm really stoked to announce Em Space's new Drupal training services in Australia. The developer course is priced and ready to go. https://secure.emspace.com.au/drupal-training/dev (Australia you say? Even if you are not Australian, are you a Drupal celebrity who'd like to visit us? Even if you are the Rob Schneider of Drupal celebrities... I'm looking for good-natured Drupal folk who want to come on a working holiday.) So anyway, what was I saying about our training ...

Installing SSL on Ubuntu with nginx

This article explains how to get your website secured with a signed certificate on a Ubuntu server running nginx.

Fairfax Australia using Drupal

When Lullabot came to Australia last year to do training in Melbourne, we had a good smattering of corporate attendance. On one table we had a developer from the ABC, THE public broadcaster in Australia, sitting next to a developer from Fairfax, which controls much of the corporate media here. It was quite exciting to consider that the biggest media organizations were exploring Drupal internally.

Today Leigh Morresi alerted me to the technology website of SMH - sure enough it's running Drupal 6! This is a really good sign, and goes along with a general increase in Drupal noise in more than a few sectors down-under.

Exporting data from MYOB with AppleScript

We wanted to display MYOB Account Edge data in our support site on the corresponding company page. Ideally you'd like to get the database, but there are no stable database driver options for Account Edge.

I found some examples on the US MYOB site which got me started with both the MYOB script library as well as AppleScript (crap, I'd prefer VBA over this, but it works).

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sime's picture
Name
Simon Hobbs
Brief

Simon, the other co-owner of the business, is a Drupal developer and consultant, on top of running the Em Space ship. Simon is involved in the monthly Drupal meetups in Melbourne, which you can find out more about via the Drupal Australia user group. Drupal user id: sime.