Makak Media | Bromley - London blogs

10 Great Summer Time Drupal Website Designs

Richard Dewick — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 13:26:22 +0000

Summer time is now officially here, the sun is out (for the moment!) so what better time to get some inspiration for your Drupal web designs.

We all like a bit of splash of colour in our designs but it's not always easy to find that balance between colourful and break out the sunglasses time!

So hopefully I've pulled together 10 designs, all on Drupal based sites (read more on Drupal if you don't know your CMS from your HTC), that bring that dose of colour along with good design.

Drupal 8 To Kick Ass!

Richard Dewick — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:48:31 +0000

DrupalCon Denver has just been and gone with over 3000 attendees Drupal is really starting to open up to the masses. The founder of Drupal, Dries Buytaert gave his keynote speech and focused on how Drupal 8 is going to kick ass by winning the hearts and minds through innovation.

He highlighted one such company, Kodak, that didn't innovate and so got left behind in the advent of digital photography. With this in mind he sees Drupal as having the chance to make Drupal 8 an innovative project which will keep Drupal ahead of the competition.

Dries mentioned some Drupal strengths such as the big community aspect and how that translates to innovation. Along with a weakness which is that demand for skilled developers is currently outstripping supply but this was just one aspect the Drupal Association is looking to counter.

One huge opportunity for Drupal 8 is the mobile market and with the expected growth of mobile usage, to increase 25 times over the next 5 years, now is the time to really address this in Drupal.

Voucher Codes & Discounts with OffersOn + Drupal

Richard Dewick — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:28:05 +0000

Voucher Codes & Discounts are big business since the advent of sites such as Groupon and vouchercodes.co.uk. So with this in mind OffersOn was created supplying daily voucher codes, discount vouchers and meal deal restaurant vouchers.

OffersOn wanted an Open Source solution and having researched the market Drupal was top of the list. A design was already in place so it was our job to build and theme the site around this.

The client is very happy with the result but we thought we'd highlight just some of what went into the site.

Modules

5 New Drupal Modules

Richard Dewick — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 20:03:48 +0000

Here's the latest group of new modules I've selected for your viewing pleasure! I'm going to make this into a regular feature so do let me know if there's a module out there that deserves some attention.

Out of the 5 modules below the two that stand out for me are Views Supertable and Textualizer. Take a look at the demo linked below and you'll see what a cool module Views Supertable is. The Textualizer module also looks good and uses JQuery to create some neat text transitions and is supported by most modern browsers and IE!

Although a couple of the modules are still dev versions they are in active development so expect a full release soon.

Children's Puzzles A Great Christmas Gift!

Richard Dewick — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 19:32:20 +0000

Kay and Vie sell children's puzzles, T-shirts and toys so with Christmas fast approaching they needed their website working. Sadly their Magento site was broken and wouldn't allow access to the admin section or checkout.

Initially we fixed the issue, which turned out to be a common bug with the PayPal secure setting but it turned out the system wasn't what the client had hoped for. So next stop was migration to Drupal and Ubercart with its more user friendly design.

Bivvy Power Pack In Demand!

Richard Dewick — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 18:09:58 +0000

BivvyPower were a start up business looking to transfer their online presence from Ebay to their own website. Having created a 12v portable power supply and keen to start selling, they began with Ebay. But due to the demand decided to work with Makak Media to design and build their online shop.

The 12v power pack was primarily designed to take fishing as it's small and lightweight. Since its launch it's been such a success in a short space of time that orders have come in from as far a field as France and Germany! This prompted BivvyPower to move quickly and start working with us and get their new site live.

Ben and Gary from BivvyPower are both keen fisherman so we decided to keep the site design based around this and their best selling product, the 12v power pack. The BivvyPower shop is powered by Drupal 7 and Ubercart 3, taking advantage of the latest open source software has to offer.

#drupalcon Day 3 Keynote by The Web Standardistas

Richard Dewick — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 13:49:12 +0000

Day 3 started off with a large bucket of tea to try to keep me awake for the rest of the day after a great night out at the o2 Arena for the Drupalcon party. Batman live was great and a show I'll try and take my nephew to.

The free drinks after were also most welcome but this did have an impact on my attention span on day 3!

The keynote today saw The Standardistas discuss marrying web fundamentals with timeless design standards and gave some great tips.

The guys started of with a short list of reading:

HTML5 for Web Designers
Grid Systems
Ordering Disorder

#drupalcon Day 2 Session Highlights

Richard Dewick — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 09:25:33 +0000

How to make Drupal perform and scale like a rock star gave some important tips on how to get your Drupal site performing.

Some background on speaker Michael Cooper is that he's built 5 CMS before he made the move over to Drupal, which illustrates again how powerful Drupal is out of the box. He's launched sites to handle 5 posts per second and those that failed in 90 seconds!

Why are most Drupal websites slow?

Full page renders
They server dynamic content to anonymous users
Excessive/non-optimised data base queries
Naughty modules!

What's the answer?

Well it turns out that caching is the answer, something built into Drupal but often not enabled by a lot of budding Drupalists.

He ran some tests using a cloud server with only 256mb RAM and then monitored the results. There's a number off ways you can monitor your sites performance such as:

Devel modules
Hprof

#drupalcon Day 2 Keynote by Tom Standage

Richard Dewick — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 09:27:12 +0000

Tom Standage, digital editor at the Economist, gave a great keynote giving an historical perspective on social media.

He started off describing in brief The Economist's move from Coldfusion over to Drupal giving one of the main reasons as the social and community features that are a core part of Drupal.

At the heart of Tom's talk was that new media is pretty much the same as old media.

What did the Romans ever do for us?!

Well it turns out that the Romans invented the tablet before Apple, that's right, back in Roman times tablets were used to note down and share information.

As time went on snippets of information were passed around on scrolls allowing for social sharing. Often these bits of information would be read by those taking the scrolls from one place to the next which is where the first encryption of data started to be introduced to keep messages private, sound familiar?

#drupalcon Day 1 Session Highlights

Richard Dewick — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 17:24:12 +0000

The day got off to a good start with an excellent keynote speech by Dries on The State of Drupal.

After a short break the rest of the day unfolded with some great sessions and here are my highlights from the day. The bangers and mash wasn't one of them so I might try the veggie option tomorrow!

If you're heading to Croydon College for a session it's a bit of a rat run, up 3 levels, turn right and keep walking then it's a right for BOF or a left Business Day sessions. Make sure you sign in at reception or you'll have security on your back.

Doing Drupal Security Right

A must read according to speaker Gábor Hojtsy is the book Cracking Drupal, I don't think he's on commission but he made a good case for buying it!

A list of security risks relevant to Drupal sites:

Misconfiguration
Avoid FTP
Site might be secure but server could be vulnerable, especially shared hosting
Avoid php input format
Most vulnerabilities are in themes