Friday, April 30, 2010

20+ WordPress Codes You Might Need On Your Next Project

Undeniably, WordPress has been a premiere choice by web designers and internet publishers as their main blogging platform. One of the considerations of their choice is the flexibility of Wordpress and easy customization of templates. Also, a lot of resources are available online on how to make the popular platform even more. Here are 20+ WordPress Codes that you can use on your next WordPress project. 

Monday, April 26, 2010

How to Control Two Computers with only One Mouse & Keyboard Without Using a KVM

synergy-plus-frontpageI've been using this technique when I needed to control my computer but at the same time use a laptop on the side for other specific tasks. The software is called Synergy+. Here are some of the key features of this great piece of free program to use only one set of mouse and keyboard across multiple computers and even with different OSes (Linux/Mac/Windows):

Saturday, April 10, 2010

How to Upgrade PHP to 5.2 in CentOS

Developing a Drupal community site has been really good for a while until I needed to search a module to integrate Facebook Connect with it. I found this module specifically for that. Unfortunately, it requires PHP version 5.2, but the one on the Godaddy VPS (which is by default a CentOS flavor) is 5.1 I think. I needed to upgrade the PHP version to 5.2, and the best possible way is to install the latest rpm for CentOS and do a yum update. Here were the steps I did:

Monday, March 29, 2010

9 Tips for Improving Drupal Performance

I've started working on a Drupal Project just last month and although the learning curve is quite steep, its also a good thing that I chose the Drupal System over others like Joomla and Wordpress for building something like an article submission site. Drupal is very advanced & flexible since its got a ton of available modules and themes. But it also entails some performance drawbacks if you continue to develop a Drupal website without thinking of performance optimization. And with that, here are 9 tips for improving Drupal performance:

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Create multiple-step forms using CCK Fieldgroups in Drupal

multi-step-form.jpg



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:

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

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:

Saturday, February 06, 2010

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+

Sunday, January 17, 2010

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:

Monday, December 07, 2009

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:

Monday, November 30, 2009

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.