A Padded Cell - Programming

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

Liam McDermott — Mon, 16 May 2011 15:12:00 +0000

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

Liam McDermott — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 18:15:10 +0000

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

Greg Sanderson — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:28:17 +0000

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

Liam McDermott — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:50:26 +0000

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

Liam McDermott — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 22:59:02 +0000

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)

Liam McDermott — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 11:54:36 +0000

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

Liam McDermott — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 05:53:10 +0000

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.