Programming

Get more sign-ups from Drupal 7: make ‘Create new account’ eye catching

by Liam McDermott, 16 May 2011 - 3:12pm

According to our analytics software between 60 and 70 percent of visitors going to the new user registration page on the Webmaster Forums do so by clicking the Create new account link in the user login block.

Goodbye vBulletin, part two: how we got away

by Liam McDermott, 26 April 2011 - 6:15pm

The previous article in this series showed our reasons for wanting to move The Webmaster Forums from vBulletin to Drupal. This second part shows how we successfully got away, and the difficulties faced.

How to automatically include your header, navigation, and footer on every page

by Greg Sanderson, 8 March 2009 - 5:28pm

Have you ever wondered how large websites handle those repetitve elements that appear on every page? The navigation menu, header, and footer usually stay the same on every page of a website. But what happens when you want to change something? Do you have to edit every page and change it separately?

PHP offers a wonderful method to resolve this with the include() statement.

An Introduction to the User Stats Module for Drupal

by Liam McDermott, 30 April 2008 - 5:50pm

The User Stats module inserts information on a user into their posts on a site. It is aimed at forum administrators who need to see the post counts, date registered and IP addresses of their users. This article provides an introduction to the User Stats module and shows how it may be used in themes.

Goodbye vBulletin, Part One: Reasons to Switch

by Liam McDermott, 3 October 2007 - 10:59pm

The aim of this article is not to poke holes, or say ‘vBulletin sucks’, but to provide constructive criticism of a successful product, proving that vBulletin is not always the best choice.

Easy PHP Debugging in Ubuntu (using Xdebug and Vim)

by Liam McDermott, 1 August 2007 - 11:54am

A debugger helps greatly when testing or bug fixing in PHP, when working with complicated code, or fixing difficult problems: a debugger is an invaluable tool. This article shows how to set up a PHP debugger in Ubuntu (tested on both Feisty 7.04 and the upcoming Gutsy 7.10) using Xdebug and Vim.

Creating Photo Galleries With ImageMagick

by Liam McDermott, 30 November 2006 - 5:53am

Part of creating a web site often involves creating photo galleries of the clients products. Usually this means the designer recieves a number of photos and must resize them into thumbnails, then link them to larger pictures.