Blogs

On one of our website for our client, we have used one taxonomy for all the states in India and each state further has various districts. These districts are added as the child term. This taxonomy is used in one of their content type, now few days back our client wanted to see a simple tabular report in which a count of all the nodes for each state can be viewed in real time.

Over the past few years we have become quite selective about the kind of work we do, rather we should say that it not really about the work that we do, but the people that we work with. We have a solid team of amazing Drupal developers who are always hungry for challenging work but we do receive lot of inquiries for simple website designing work where Drupal is not really required, there are plenty of other CMS for developing a simple website with great design.

We started using Vagrant last year in 2014 mainly because we find it really good for managing virtual machines and also for provisioning the platforms. Most of the developers in our company use fedora, but some also use Ubuntu and Windows too. Now it is possible to setip LAMP or XAMP in all the platforms but it is difficult to develop your application in one fedora and expect it to work perfectly in other operating system.

If you ask any Drupal developer and site builder to list their top favorite module then I am sure Views will be surely in their list. It is such an amazing module that I don't think any site is built without using this module and it should probably be listed in Drupal hall of fame of modules. This post is not entirely about Views module but rather a small use case that I wanted to discuss with others. Using views people usually create a Durpal block, page or feed.

Do you love working on console without any graphical environment or any sort of GUI? If yes then read further. At sparxsys we work mostly on Linux based operating system like Fedora, Ubuntu and CentOS. No matter what the O.S. is we use Emacs a lot, we love it because this single editor can be used for various programming languages and also it is like a mini O.S. on its own. You can also manage your files using Emacs and it can be automated to load the modes based on the file extension.

When we started this company 5 years back in 2010, we were working only in Drupal, over the years we have developed a good competency on not just Drupal but various other open source technologies. Things were going great but we also started venturing into new technologies and tried something different. Internally we have been using lot of different tools for project management and issue tracking. We got familiar with JIRA before even formally starting our company, though it not open source tool but it offers lot of flexibility. The way we can customize it to map different workflows.

We are proud to announce that we recently got selected by Cabinet Secretariat office to maintain the portal for Government Performance Management Peer Assisted Learning, better known as GO-PEM-PAL. Their current website can be checked at http://gopempal.org/. This project is funded by United Nations Development Programe, UNDP and sparxsys proven competency and years of experience was the reason that this project was given to us.

JIRA is indeed one of the best issue tracker in the market. The best thing about this tool which I like is the customizations that you can do in it that too managed from the UI itself. Of course there are lot of things are can be done through the interface but sometimes there could be a possibility that you are looking to implement some behavior in the the interface but couldn't find the right solution.

JIRA comes with an in built feature to change the colors of various elements, you can also upload your own logo on top and use the colors that are standard in your organization. Though sometimes changing the colors might not be sufficient. You may want to change the size of regions, or giving extra padding at certain locations. How would you do that. There are certain add-ons that you can use to install various theme that can change the look and feel completely but I prefer to have my own style. It is possible to insert your own CSS file and override the default look and feel.

Omega 4 is a great theme for creating amazing responsive site in Drupal. There are lot of improvements in Omega 4 over Omega 3 but it is a bit difficult to work on Omega 4, which is actually for a good reason as it brings lot of flexibility. Omega 4 now supports SASS and the system need to be prepared first before you can start using SASS. Today we are sharing instructions to setup Ruby, RVM, Gems and Bundle Install RVM su \curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable