Blogs

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

In this blog we are going to share how we created a floating topbar on our company's website - www.sparxsys.com The moment you open the site, the topbar looks normal, just like any other site, but the moment you start scrolling the bar goes up, disappears and it comes back and stays on top for the rest of the site. It could be a great way to engage with your users and highlight certain links of your website.

Learning Drupal is not difficult at all. You can learn to create a decent website in Drupal in few months only but when your site grows both in terms of content and functionality then you need to make sure that the site performance is not hampered and also it should be easy to maintain it. There are lot of mistakes that new Drupal developers do when they create big Drupal sites. Today we will highlight some of the things to keep in mind for creating and maintain a Drupal site.

If you have been working on Drupal creating websites then I am sure you must had a need to clone or duplicate a node. Let me give you an example. These days I am working on a website for one of my client where we need to display electronic house hold products like Water Heaters, Ventilation Fans, Cooks Tops etc. Now most of these products in the same category have similar attributes but only difference in size or color. Now when we add a new product it is a pain to fill all the fields that contains the product specifications. I thought there must be a way to clone it.