Happy Pixels

Behind the scenes of DrupalCon Munich

2012-01-16T16:00:00Z

It has been a few months since Munich was announced as the location of the next european DrupalCon, but much of what has happened since then has been mostly invisible to the community. Many people attend DrupalCon, but few people are aware of what...

Feature Hats

2011-05-13T04:52:29Z

Despite the title, wunderkraut has not yet branched out to hatmaking: The "feature hats" we're talking about is our approach to minimize conflicts when using a code-drive development method for Drupal, especially when using Drupal features for storing...

Boost image loading performance with Imagilicious

2011-04-01T06:34:35Z

It is a well known fact that pages with many images load more slowly than simple HTML pages. Not only are image files heavier than text files, they also require additional HTTP requests.

In an attempt to solve both of these performance problems, I have created a new Drupal module: Imagilicious. Imagilicious replaces tags that reference an external image to be loaded with a 100% HTML rendering of the same image. Unlike immature technologies like the <canvas> element, Immagilicious uses tables, which guarantee compatibility even with the most outdated browsers.

Dries, if you come to Munich...

2010-04-12T04:54:52Z

The Drupal community is a very diverse one. So when the idea came up to make a viral video to promote the DrupalDevDays and invite Dries Buytaert (founder of the Drupal project), we didn't have a shortage of talent in the local community. From video...

Drupal Dev Days & Ticket Giveaway

2010-03-19T09:49:22Z

As a member of the organizing team, I am happy to invite you to the Drupal Dev Days (aka DrupalCamp Germany 2010), which will take place on May 8th and 9th in Munich. We already announced the event on many German-speaking channels, but I would like...

Upgrading large & complex sites

2010-02-25T14:45:38Z

Upgrading Drupal websites from one major version to the next is painful. Most people solve the problem by sticking with the old version, and I've seen a lot of people give up after trying for many days. I've myself done a good amount of (successful...

Drupal Media Camp Switzerland

2009-05-09T02:37:42Z

Drupal Media Camp Switzerland took place this week-end, less than a year after the idea of a Swiss DrupalCamp was introduced at a Drupal user group meeting in Zurich. This event was full of good presentations, exciting moments and networking opportunities, and I believe it was very successful in increasing the adoption of the Drupal CMS on the Swiss market. It was particularly interesting to have the Swiss-german Radio DRS and the news publisher Edipresse provide yet another example showing that Drupal can support large amounts of traffic and also generated some great conversation on various topics surrounding high-traffic websites.

RDF in Core code sprint: more details

2009-05-05T13:11:42Z

The RDF code sprint is now less than a week away, and it's time to give you a quick update. For more information have a look at the original announcement as well as last week's blog post from Stephane Corlosquet.

We now have a few more participants...

The Perfect Music Festival

2009-04-01T11:39:33Z

If you have some friends with a Last.FM account, head over to http://perfectfestival.com, where you can generate the homepage for a fictive music festival where all their favorite bands are playing! Try something like "Hey chx, I'm going to Perfect Festival at the end of June, should I get you some tickets too?"

Test Automation

2009-03-03T09:10:42Z

SimpleTest has brought a technology to Drupal, but also a methodology, both of which have greatly enhanced the Drupal development process. The test automation methodology is common to all testing frameworks. It is the topic of this article and will...

Triggering the creation of imagecache derivatives programmatically

2009-02-22T21:14:25Z

I was recently faced with the same problem in two different projects: forcing the creation of an image derivative with imagecache so that it is available in the submit handler of the same form in which the image was uploaded. By default, imagecache generates images on demand triggered by an HTTP request, which is ideal for most cases. However, this design doesn't make it possible to trigger the generation of images programmatically, which is why I created the following code snippet.

<?php
function imagecache_generate($presetname, $filepath) {
  if (!$preset = imagecache_preset_by_name($presetname)) {
    return;
  }
  
  $dst = imagecache_create_path($presetname, $filepath);
  
  if (!file_exists($dst)) {
imagecache_build_derivative($preset['actions'], $filepath, $dst);
  }
  
  return $dst;
}
?>

This snippet is based on _imagecache_cache(), but instead of transferring an image in response to an HTTP request, it returns the path to the generated image.

Note that you do not need to do this unless you are doing some special processing with your image (in my case: including it in a generated PDF document or passing it as a parameter to a command-line executable which generates "magic eye" images).

What's in Drupal?

2009-02-19T00:23:02Z

I was wondering what it would look like if you put all of Drupal's code into wordle. It turns out that Drupal has a lot of arrays, functions and forms, which is not too surprising. What's more interesting is a comparison between different versions...