Blogs

At Sparxsys we have a client who run one internal website in their company. Now recently a requirement came from one of the department that they also want to run a similar website with exact same features but with little modifications here and there. Earlier we thought that we will deploy a totally new Drupal installation but then we realized that this is a perfect use case for Drupal multisite feature.

Drupal comes with a core module known as contact. This module provides a site wide contact form to the visitors for communicating with you. This module will give you a page with a form where people can type in their name, email and message. after submitting an email is sent to the mail that you configured. It can be used to provide feedback, suggestion, ask for technical support etc. The contact form is available on the contact page of the site the url is like /contact.

Virtually any organization that wants to keep in touch with its existing constituents, reach new audiences and present a compelling call to action needs an up-to-date Web presence. Nonprofit organizations are no exception. With budget and resources stretched thin, nonprofits need website technology that is inexpensive and easy to maintain. Drupal, an open-source content management system, is a good choice for nonprofits seeking modern functionality with a minimal financial and time commitment.

Over the past few years we have developed unmatched competency on Atlassian tools especially JIRA, we got opportunities to work with several IT companies in India. Working for clients and providing them services is the best way to learn and expand your knowledge. Coming to the point quickly. I have been writing a book on JIRA that was recently published and ready for order.

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.