Create multiple-step forms using CCK Fieldgroups in Drupal

Lately I've been working on a Drupal project, and one aspect in our priority list is the user-friendliness for the people who will submit their contents to the site. A good solution would be to divide the submission form into different steps so that the form page would not be so crowded. Thanks to David Newker for his solution on how to create muliple step forms using CCK Fieldgroups in Drupal. Here are the instructions I followed:

How to optimize GoDaddy Virtual Private Server - Kill Tomcat & Simple Control Panel

While searching for some optimization tips for Virtual Private Servers, I checked out this post which claimed that Godaddy (ahem) VPS sucked BUT offering a solution to those who were on the same boat (in this case, I).  Luckily, I tried out his solution and it has proven to speed up the Godaddy VPS.

To give an overview of our setup, we have a few (like 20 ?) websites hosted on the GoDaddy server and its occasionally bugging down. One optimization I did was to kill some processes that are not needed most of the time which takes up a few MBs of RAM from the server.

So here is the solution that I implemented on the said VPS as suggested by Colin McNamara - basically to stop the Apache Tomcat and Godaddy Simple Control Panel, which are used very rarely. But of course, if you need to use the Simple Control Panel, you can always start it up again then turn it off when you are done.

Here are the steps:

Allow Div Layers to Float over Flash, Youtube or Vimeo Videos

For web designers, its always a constant struggle to get those flash, youtube, or vimeo videos tuck under divs where you need them. They somehow always behave like their z-index is close to infinity.

By default Flash content in a web page will appear on top of other elements on the page, including floating menus, inline popups etc. This can be pretty annoying if you have a flyout menu on your page and it goes behind the Flash video and this post shows how simple it is to fix. This works in all browsers inclding IE6+

How to Install/Recompile MCRYPT in PHP (CentOS VPS)

I'm starting to develop sites with the Interspire Shopping Cart system, which I think is totally way better than Prestashop. I suggest people who want a better system than Prestashop to checkout the Interspire Shopping Cart, its worth every penny.

So I'm setting it up for our company in a VPS hosting, and it requires the PHP installation to be compiled with MCRYPT package. Specifically, this is needed for the manual credit card processing module. And it seems that the Godaddy VPS support is NOT willing to support (ironic) so I had to deal with the challenge myself. I found this instructions from NotesBit.com on how to recompile PHP with MCRYPT support. Here are the steps I followed - it was actually easier than I thought:

100 New Free but Premium-like Wordpress Themes

If you're a Worpress Theme addict and you've not yet visited this post, I suggest you do because these are some of the best Premium-like Wordpress Themes available. I've gone through the list, and 90% of it I really like. Especially the themes Magiting, Matiyaga, Mainam and Marangal from Padd Solutions (a fellow Pinoy web development firm). I've already bookmarked it, and I think you should too. Here are some of the Wordpress themes I plan to use in my future projects:

Search and Replace in MySQL

I just went through a domain transfer for one of our websites, and the links in the posts are all pointing to OldSite.com rather than the NewSite.com. But it's an easy fix, as long as you got Google.

How To Completely Backup your GoDaddy Website Files

Godaddy mainly offers domain names for sale, but they are also selling hosting plans including shared hosting, VPS and dedicated server. For those who are using shared linux hosting on Godaddy, it can be a pain to backup all of your website's files because they do not have an option for that purpose. This has been my problem too when we needed to transfer from Godaddy shared hosting to VPS - the files needed to be backed-up.

Here are two ways you can backup your Godaddy website files:

What Happens to Your Online Accounts When You Die

You're a web designer, you have 22 Gmail accounts, 13 Yahoo Messenger accounts, 50,000 MySpace contacts and 26,000 Facebook friends. You just finished Tweeting about your ham and egg breakfast, you choked from your orange juice that contained your cat's favorite yarn ball - you die. What would ever happen to your online accounts now? Will your accounts be automatically deleted, or will your Facebook account automatically send an update that "Mr. Online Guy has just died". Luckily, people from MakeUseOf were actually thinking about it and made a research which concludes:

Ultimate Guide to Grid-Based Web Design

Web design trends now point to one aspect of using CSS for the basic website wireframe - Grid-based layouts. I haven't actually used this into my projects lately, but I'm really planning to jump into the bandwagon. I don't wanna be left out! I stumbled upon this site called 960 Grid System which offers a CSS generator for your grid layout, as well as examples of websites that use the grid-based system. Since then I've tried to go deeper into knowing how grid layouts work.

5 Amazing Online Image Editors For Designers

About 10 years ago, I used to crop my images using MS Paint because either image editing software were expensive or my slow computer cannot compliment the requirements of Adobe Photoshop 1. But nowadays online image editors are now available, and they are far more better than p..p..Paint. Here are 5 online image editors that designers should bookmark.