Egypt’s leading bookstore, Diwan, launched its long awaited site featuring all of its products from books, music, DVDs, children’s section, and stationery through a searchable catalogue with online ordering and buying options.Read more
drupal
AdHack: People-Powered DIY Advertising Marketplace and Community
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AdHack is an innovative online marketplace for advertising work, bypassing bloated creative agencies to directly connect ad buyers with ad creators.
Entirely built on Drupal, the AdHack site is the cornerstone of the company's business model. OpenCraft was contracted to upgrade AdHack.com to the latest Drupal version, as well as add a host of new features to enhance the site's usability and enable online business transactions.
AdHack and OpenCraft are currently enjoying an on-going arrangement to maintain and extend AdHack.com.
Through our work with AdHack, we were able to practice our brand of agile development with great results. As usual, the Drupal ecosystem helped a lot! Here are a few factors to the success of our approach:
- Focus on communication: In the case of AdHack.com, our lead developer was present at the AdHack premises which ensured great communication and rapid feedback. Not to mention frequent delicious sushi lunches!
- Managing expectations and scope: Instead of over-promising, we prefer to discuss the scope in depth to make sure no unexpected details will complicate the implementation. Based on rough wireframes, we are able to provide realistic estimates to the completion of each feature. The client is then able to make informed decisions regarding the priority of needed features.
- Minimal new code: Thanks to the plethora of community-contributed Drupal modules, we are able to rapidly prototype the required features with no coding. When out-of-the-box features are incomplete, we create patches and contribute them back to the relevant modules. In addition, we avoid hacking Drupal at all costs! In general, we find that business-specific logic requires the most new code, and we usually create a project-specific module to contain this code.
- Documenting the development: A key factor to ensure the sustainability of a Web application is enabling the internal team to manage the application on their own. To this end, each feature is documented as a separate ticket that is tracked to closure, including a description of the relevant Drupal settings that control it.
Some great features were added to AdHack.com. They include:
- Twitter integration using the Twitter module and additional patches to re-tweet and list all tweets that contain business-specific #hashtags.
- Geo-tagging and Google Maps integration with microformat awareness.
- User points integration with additional patches to further customize points allocation.
- Computed fields in Views with additional patches to support sorting.
- PayPal integration with business-specific workflows.
- Customized site search.
- Cross-browser compatibility: Firefox 3, Safari, IE 7/8.
Mon, 2009-07-13 12:04
Drupal performance optimization part 1
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Islam Amer Recently, we have a need for optimizing the performance of our drupal deployments, beyond the conventional mysql and apache optimization.
The first and easiest thing is to install a PHP Opcode Cache, and after some investigation I decided to try APC. Installing the version in PECL worked well on the staging environment.Read more
Thu, 2009-07-09 09:36
Reverse-translating a string back into English in Drupal
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Karim Ratib While writing the security component for Views Bulk Operations, I needed to create a permission for the execution of each action declared in the system. This would allow the admin to decide which user groups would be able to execute which actions.Read more
Sun, 2009-06-28 03:20
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Who needs Google Spreadsheets: Use Sheetnode!
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Karim Ratib Google Spreadsheets are cool, but their problem is that they are hosted at Google instead of in your intranet portal. That means that they don't integrate easily with your other Web documents, in terms of classification, indexing, permissions, etc. The API provided by Google does help there, it's true. But what about adding new features? Google Docs simply isn't open source, and therefore is not ideal.Read more
Thu, 2009-06-25 16:54
ArabTechies Code Sprint
This is a bit late but I've been extremely busy the past couple of weeks. On the 20th of May 2009 ArabTechies organized a code sprint for 3 days to solve problems related to processing Arabic. I, among other software developers from Arabtechies, worked for 3 days on several projects. I mainly worked on integrating the features of the Ar-php library into Drupal 6. You can find the resulting module on this project page on drupal.org.Read more
Tue, 2009-06-23 01:17
Code contribution: Views Bulk Operations (VBO)
By:
Karim Ratib In Drupal, can you modify the author of all nodes of type 'Story' whose title contains the word 'News:' to be user 'editor', without going through each node manually (or programmatically) ?
Before Views Bulk Operations (VBO for friends), you couldn't.
VBO builds upon existing modules and APIs to perform the useful function of mass-editing nodes, users, comments, or any other Drupal object. It reuses the incredibly powerful query builder [Views][] to list the nodes of interest, and it reuses the [Actions API][] to allow users to apply operations upon all selected nodes at once.Read more
Wed, 2009-05-13 17:00
Hello, World, wide web! (Take 3)
We are excited to announce that our new website is launched (obviously) :). Visually speaking, we have a brand new design that is beautiful and usable. We focused on making it easy to find all needed information about our work and to get in touch with us.Read more
De Birs Yachts
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URL:
In a simple professional looking design, Debirs Yachts website is built using Drupal 6 CMS. Panels module was the main module used along with CCK and Views. It was used to display products and galleries.
Explore Sinai Portal
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A community portal to help as an ultimate guide for alternative tourism in Sinai. The website is financed by the European Union and it aims to be a social community website where visitors can create accounts, have profiles, add reviews and photos of places they have visited in Sinai.
Drupal platform was used to create the ExploreSinai portal. OpenCraft was also responsible to collect and add data of all lodges, restaurants and adventure centers in Sinai. We added all the current content with the help of the Import Module.
