DrupalCube Blog

PDF using mPDF Drupal Module

Team OSSCube — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 13:47:18 +0000

We have introduced a new module developed by our Drupal team which makes it easy to convert HTML files to PDF documents. This module was basically developed for one of our clients from travel vertical. The objective of this module was to meet our client’s requirement of generating travel packages quickly with interactiveness. Earlier the client was using mailing system for sending travel packages to its customers; and this process was time consuming, and lacks its visual appeal.

This custom module converts HTML pages to PDF documents using mPDF PHP Library. It allows you to generate a PDF document of any node and works very well on a Linux/PHP/Drupal environment.

Features:

PDF creation (www.example.com/node/nid/pdf) where nid is the node id of content to render.
PDF generation API is provided, the content developers can use this API to generate a PDF document.
By creating your own CSS file and/or the node.tpl.php template files, it is possible to change the look of the output page to suit your taste. For a more fine-grained customization, it is possible to use a template file named:

Drupal 7: node--[node-type|node-id].tpl.php located in your theme directory. Where node-type & node-id are Drupal's node type (e.g. page, story, etc.) and node-id (eg: 12) respectively.

API Function: pdf_using_mpdf_api()

This API function is available to content developers who prefer to generate a pdf file of custom path. The function takes two parameters, first a rendered html content and an optional second parameter, name of the pdf file. E.g: pdf_using_mpdf_api($html) where $html is any html content.

Requirements

You must install the following third-party tools to generate PDF documents:

mPDF

Dependencies

Libraries API

Please follow the instructions in the README.txt files carefully.

The module is now successfully contributed to Drupal community. So, it’s FREE to download.

So, this utility really makes the process of converting HTML files to PDF documents for true mobility and portability with a high level of security.

Should we build a scalable website with[out] a CMS?

brian — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 11:15:39 +0000

Today, the explosion in content creation is more than ever before with its growing role in marketing strategy & analysis, tapping new opportunities and reaching new prospects. Now, the way content is generated for different platforms for better web experiences is, obviously, bringing new challenges for enterprises in terms of quick content delivery with proper quality, and at preferably lower cost. To be consistent with these challenges, everyday companies take new approaches.

But, building websites with features that speed-up content delivery process, integrate seamlessly with third-party apps for content sharing, replicate content on several DBs to keep new content in sync, as well as give better capability to handle traffic surges… come with unique challenges. And when you work at bigger scale, the question of having a robust system do arises. If you are a non-tech savvy person, what irks you most in managing your website: coding new pages from a template, copying the file to the FTP server, manually linking to other pages and much more. And, if you have to update content frequently, definitely it is going to be a big hassle. Such hassles are driving businesses to adopt a content management solution that would increase efficiency, improve control of information, and reduce the overall cost of information management for the enterprise.

Open source CMS Frameworks like Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla are quite popular in their own terms, but if you want more than just a ‘Blog’ site, there is almost no boundary to what you can build with Drupal. The growth of Drupal for last many years has been phenomenal at many fronts. The nice thing about Drupal is the way it enables us to build simple, reliable and secure web sites. The biggest adoption point for Drupal is its flexibility of customization, limitless expansion hooks, a huge library of modules, and powerful tools for code-free construction. It enables you add functionality and features such as e-commerce, forums, media, search, geographic data, dates, workflow, messaging, forms, social networking. Beyond that you can customize the interface using templates, CSS, etc. Drupal as a standalone has also done some awesome work at enterprise level.

If we have to evaluate any CMS’s capability at enterprise-level, majorly the following factors are benchmark and Drupal is good enough to address them.

Scalability: Drupal’s scalability has been tested by many enterprises and you can deploy this open source CMS on a single server or across a load-balanced, distributed server cluster to tackle huge traffic surges. The Economist website which is built with Drupal, is a good example which has over 3 million registered users and 30 million page views per month.

Independent and Reliable: Drupal is Platform, Web Server and Database independent. While the standard install configuration is on Linux, Apache and MySQL or PostgreSQL, you can also easily install on Windows servers running IIS and Microsoft SQL Server, Solaris, BSD or Mac OS X as per your needs. Drupal is ideally deployed on a LAMP stack using the Linux OS, Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP programming language.

Security: Drupal’s core modules are quite robust to avert common security vulnerabilities defined by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). A special Drupal security team is continuously monitoring and addressing security vulnerability with Drupal core.

Extendibility and Interoperability: You can extend Drupal the way you want and it can easily integrate with other web applications such as Payment Services, CRM, Social Networks, ERP, GeoLocation tools and many more through open standards and web services like XML, REST and JSON.

Localization and Multi-Lingual: Drupal’s capabilities allow translating the user interface into different languages and creating different date formats for each language.

Community Strength: A community of 630,000+ users and developers across the globe constantly develops and maintains Drupal. Drupal developers have been the major force behind its roaring success, in extending its ability as well as keeping this platform up to date with the latest technology.

The below screen shows Drupal’s awesomeness and its adoption in government sector.

However, as with growing web experiences, new models are rapidly evolving that leave us with room for more customization and optimization. Drupal is quite flexible and robust (used as a back-end system for at least 1.5% of all websites worldwide) as your CMS of choice for content, products, groups, images, users, videos and other large scale work. But before you start ‘gluing’ and ‘crafting’ together an amazing website on any CMS, it is important to define your needs and objectives of website. And, if you find hard in choosing a better CMS platform, we, at DrupalCube, are just one step away.

We are also attending DrupalCon Portland 2013, so if you are in and around Portland…come and meet us for networking, informal conversations, and more.

We are a Drupal Development and Consulting Company, focusing purely on Drupal capabilities to provide enterprise-level Drupal services you need to succeed. Powerful and End-to-End Drupal solutions for global leaders is what we do best. It's what we focus on to distill the essence of Drupal for business needs. This focus means our vast pool of Architects, Designers, and Drupal Experts, working across our principal locations spread across North America, the UK & India, are skilled to take any Drupal challenge. Giving you a wealth of specialist expertise to customize Drupal into the areas, which may not be possible directly.

The first alpha release of Spark announced

vippan — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 13:26:15 +0000

There is quite a buzz around the Spark project over the past few months. Perhaps, many of you have heard about Spark- the Drupal distribution for in-place content authoring. In short, Spark is a Drupal distribution which aims to greatly improve the authoring experience of Drupal, through a Drupal 7 distribution that can be used today, but can also be proposed as Drupal 8 core improvements for tomorrow.

The Spark project was announced by Dries Buytaert at the DrupalCon Denver 2012, and since then the Spark team has been working hard on initial research and design. The videos of prototypes of inline editing, responsive layout building and mobile administration have also been made available. You can check its features and related videos here http://drupal.org/project/spark.

So far, the project is in great progress and really shaping up well. The latest release of Spark 7.x-1.0-alpha4 is out and now ready for some community testing! Read here Spark update: ready for alpha testing for more info on the release.

If you want try it out, you can download Spark from http://drupal.org/project/spark.

DrupalCube, an Acquia partner and Drupal Association Organization Member, has extensive experience in Drupal customization services. We specialize in offering all Drupal web development services such as customize Drupal theming for visual design and layout, module development or customization and maintenance & upgrade services, addressing your unique business needs.

Drupal’s Future Growth: Is it shaping up well?

Team Drupalcube — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 09:49:00 +0000

The growth of Drupal is certainly on the rise. Drupal CMS has become a widely popular platform for many businesses, from small/large enterprises to government and public services, to build high-performance, scalable and secure websites. Many organizations are doing really awesome things with this open source content management system, and bringing everyday new ideas around its environment. The latest example is Twitter who has recently selected Acquia and Drupal to power its developer community website.

As per buildwith.com, there are more than 3,80,000 sites using Drupal platform. Its growth is steady, well-sustained and on the track. Drupal’s future is being taken care of and is well on its way to continued success. This along with Drupal usage trend and its global enterprise success cases have been effectively explained in an article by Felipe Rubim.

There is already much hype around Drupal 8, the way it is being developed with its new features and UI. The eighth version of the platform has even started drawing many reviews on its development and progress. Given the announcements and discussions happening around Drupal 8, this release could be a next big thing in the open source CMS.

Moreover, Drupal community is flourishing strongly. The best proof is the growing frequency of conferences and events occurring across the world. The vibrant community is in its exponential growth from 70,000 members to over 800,000 and from 700 committers to over 18,000. The Drupal Association is doing an excellent job to support Drupal and its growing community. In fact, the Drupal Association is now in its transition phase as revealed by Dries Buytaert in his blog post. Plus, there is an Acquia's Large Scale Drupal program that discusses and collaborates on common problems. These all are the central cohesive forces of Drupal’s growth and its success. I hope that these growing forces around this open source CMS would provide a lot more opportunities ahead.

We, at DrupalCube, have partnered up with many enterprises for Drupal customization and building large scale websites. Being an Organization Member of the Drupal Association, we are thrilled about Drupal’s growing reach and capabilities.

Drupal 6.26 and Drupal 7.14 updates released

vippan — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 07:22:31 +0000

Drupal has recently released bug fixes and security updates for Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 versions. Drupal 7.14 is now available for download, which contains bug fixes as well as fixes for security vulnerabilities from Drupal 7.13. Read the full Drupal 7.14 release notes. Drupal 6.26, which fixes known bugs (no security issues) is also available for download.

Click here to know in details what is included with each release. The updates for both releases can be downloaded from Drupal website.

Tags:

drupal

OSSCube expands its portfolio, now a Talend Gold Partner

vineet — Wed, 30 May 2012 11:02:16 +0000

Team, time to clap for OSSCube’s new feat! Just a few days ago, OSSCube struck a strong partnership with Talend— the Open Source Integration Software Company, and from now on we are a Talend Gold partner for the US, UK and India. In fact we are covered for UK, Eire, Nordics, India, Middle East, South Africa and USA. We are confident that this new partnership will further empower us in our continued move to deliver cost effective and enterprise scale data solutions to solve complex issues for our clients.

Talend provides open source middleware solutions that enable organizations to gain more value from their applications, systems and databases. This alliance will enable us to take full advantage of Talend’s internal expertise and leverage Talend’s open source community for delivering enterprise-level data integration and data migration solutions.

Via Talend.com: Shattering the traditional proprietary model, Talend democratizes the integration market by providing enterprise-grade open source technologies that cover both the data integration and application integration needs of organizations of all sizes. Talend's unified integration platform addresses projects such as data integration, ETL, data quality, master data management and application integration. With their proven performance, ease of use, extensibility and robustness, Talend's solutions are the most widely used and deployed integration solutions in the world.

“Talend is a great addition to our portfolio. We will be able to optimize the process of Integration, Migration, improving Data Quality for our customers using Talend. Talend will also be a great addition to our Big Data capabilities” and we will be organizing training for a team of 8 who can then become trainers for other people within OSSCube, said Shashin Shah - Managing Director, OSSCube, UK.

So, let’s welcome another set of skills in OSSCube team. And, I will update you soon once the Talend training schedule is finalized.

Tags:

Talend

OSSCube to co-host webinar with Acquia

vippan — Thu, 17 May 2012 06:00:05 +0000

You might have heard this before. Now OSSCube officially invites you to join a specially designed webinar “Unleash the powerful capabilities of Drupal with SugarCRM solution” that will help you explore the integrated power of Drupal and SugarCRM. To be co-hosted with Acquia, this live webinar will present the many business and technical benefits and will explain how you can leverage the combined capabilities of these popular open source platforms.

Here's a taste of what you will learn from this webinar:

Common PHP platform for CMS and CRM aligns IT software development strategy?
How to increase visibility of data and collaboration by exposing CRM data to portal users?
How to reduce costs by eliminating double data entry through an integrated portal and CRM?

Who should attend?

IT Managers, Directors of Operations, Directors of Sales, Directors of Customer Support can greatly benefit from this opportunity.

There will also be an opportunity to get wind of those customers success story, enjoying the fruits of an integrated SugarCRM and Drupal system.

Date: Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Time: 01:00 PM EDT

Duration: 1 hour

Speaker: Brian Land, OSSCube

So, join Brian Land on May 23, 2012 to realize the business benefits of a seamless world class CRM and CMS integration.

You can register for this webinar here.

DrupalCon Portland 2013

vippan — Wed, 09 May 2012 04:07:47 +0000

Portland has a very active open source community and now it will be the venue for DrupalCon Portland 2013. To be held on May 20-24, 2013, the aim of DrupalCon Portland is to bring together the people who use, develop, design, and support the Drupal platform. The conference is being expected to be one of the most exciting events as Portland is a home of many open source companies including the Drupal Association, Linus Torvalds of Linux fame, as well as the nearby Oregon State University Open Source Labs.

You will have a chance to meet the most influential people and brightest minds of the Drupal community– people you might not meet otherwise. And of course, more surprises in store for those in attendance … beer, salmon, coffee, roses, and loads of open source that you are expecting from DrupalCon Portland 2013.

OSSCube looks forward to seeing you in Portland for networking, informal conversations, and more. So, don’t miss the chance to share experience with the experts and gain fresh ideas around Drupal.

When : May 20-24, 2013
Where: "Silicon Forest" Portland

For more information and to know how the event is shaping up, stay tuned to http://portland2013.drupal.org

DrupalCon Denver 2012

vippan — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 05:05:45 +0000

DrupalCon Denver, held on March 19-23, 2012, ended up with lots of learning and enthusiasm! In the course of five days, the conference witnessed 3 amazing Keynotes (from Mozilla, Acquia and LukeW Ideation & Design), 103 Sessions and 14 Pre-Conference Trainings. Over 3000+ attendees flooded the conference to elevate the spirit of Drupal Community.

Dries Buytaert (Creator of Drupal, Acquia CTO) in his keynote session spoke about the future of Drupal, Drupal 8 and also about the direction Drupal Core is taking. You can watch this keynote video here.

Luke Wroblewski (Digital Product Design Lead, LukeW Ideation & Design) in his keynote explored three key reasons to consider mobile first: mobile is seeing explosive growth; mobile forces you to focus; and mobile extends your capabilities. Watch video here

Though, I couldn’t keep track of these sessions when they were live, but some interesting concepts, for sure, were brought to the fore by industry experts in front of the most amazing open source community in the world.

Here are some interesting sessions that are worth watching (I mean recorded videos):

The Drupal Community: Where are we going and how to get involved?

By Angie Byron (Drupal 7 Core Maintainer, Acquia)

Competing with Giants - How to Win with Drupal vs Proprietary Alternatives?

By Bryan House (Vice President of Marketing, Acquia)

Real World Performance Analysis: How to identify performance problems in your own sites?

By Narayan Newton (Partner and CTO, Tag 1 Consulting)

How Drupal is Transforming Government: 7 Case Studies?

By Jeff Walpole (CEO, Phase2)

Using Sass & Compass in Drupal Theming

By Matt Farina (Engineer, Hewlett-Packard)

Managing Highly Successful Drupal Migrations

By Frank Febbraro (Chief Technology Officer, Phase2)

If you haven’t yet hit to any of the above sessions, I leave you with the links of video presentations. To catch recorded videos of keynote sessions and feature speakers, visit http://denver2012.drupal.org/featured-speakers

Drupal is now a global phenomenon, but is it ready for more challenges?

vippan — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 11:03:11 +0000

In recent years, Drupal has evolved into an increasingly powerful content management system. From single-user blogs, enterprise intranets, virtual stores to online magazines, Drupal now powers 7.2 millions websites across the globe, including websites for the White House, Whitehall, NASA, Greenpeace and the UK Government ( data.gov.uk).

Since Drupal 7 release, it has been a phenomenal success and is being adopted with unprecedented rapidity, in fact twice faster than Drupal 6. Thanks to the community of Drupal developers who have been the major force behind its roaring success, in extending its ability as well as keeping this platform up to date with the latest technology. It is quite exciting to know that a Google Plus module was made available within 12 hours of the social network being released.

But there is no rest for success … and Drupal is no exception!

In some ways, Drupal is a victim of its own success, Dries Buytaert said, with demand for Drupal experts to build and support sites using the CMS currently outstripping supply.

He said, "The biggest challenge that we have right now is scaling. The demand for Drupal is so high that we need more Drupal experts in the world."

"That's a challenge, but if you are a Drupal developer you are in a good spot, because many of them make a lot of money because of the high demand."

Drupal also faces competition from proprietary CMSes, such as OpenText's web content-management software, SDL Tridion and Sitecore, as well as fellow open-source CMS WordPress.

But the major challenge is the further growth of Drupal by making it a better product for end-users. As development of Drupal 8 has already kicked off, it has promised to introduce native support for HTML5, improve the CMS's ability to output content in multiple formats, such as XML and JSON, and more.

All in all, 2011 has been a great year for Drupal. Now the exciting part is that Drupal has reached a stage where it only needs to be made better. And things for Drupal 8 seem to shaping up really well to make this an exciting release.

Do check this interesting story as well on Drupal: How a dorm room tech project became a global phenomenon.

Source: TechRepublic