We Are Proud To Welcome Padraic Mcateer To Our Web Development Team
Written by Martin Wong on December 30, 2010
We are proud to welcome Padraic Mcateer to our web development team. An Irish expat who recently re-located to Vancouver, Padraic has over 10 years of experience in digital design working for high profile clients like Travelocity, RIM, Proctor & Gamble, Ogilvy and Kimberley-Clark.
He has been involved in the development of interactive solutions at every stage of the project process from, idea generation, through to conceptualization, planning, production, testing and final delivery of finished product to the client.
To see more of his work, visit his web portfolio.
Applying the Drupal theme to your web application
Written by Howard Chang on December 20, 2010
Our company uses quite a bit of custom built web applications on our Smartt.com website. When we decided to migrate Smartt.com (a Wordpress website) to Drupal, we immediately ran into problems applying the Drupal theme to those custom built applications.
I hope this solution that we discovered can help you if you are also struggling with the same problem.
- Create a page node in Drupal and call it Wrapper Top. Write down the node ID as well as the page URL (let’s assume the node ID here is 3).
- Create a page node in Drupal and call it Wrapper Bottom. Write down the node ID as well as the page URL (let’s assume the node ID here is 4).
- Create a file that only includes your Drupal header and some additional markup, and call it page-node-3.tpl.php under your Drupal theme directory.
- Create another file that contains only the footer section of your Drupal template, and call it page-node-4.tpl.php under your Drupal theme directory. Now if you try to access those two pages, you’ll see one with only the header and one that has no style applied but has all the footer HTML markup.
- In your web application, read and output the Wrapper Top page in the header section and do the same to read and output the Wrapper Bottom page in the footer section.
- If your web application has its own title, you can use str_replace or preg_replace to manipulate the Wrapper Top page content before you print the content out.
Image credit: Gábor Hojtsy /cc
A Tale of Two MP3 Players
Written by Martin Wong on December 17, 2010
You need an army of third party developers and partners if you want your product to succeed in today’s marketplace.
Two weeks ago, I decided to upgrade my SensaClip MP3 player to something a little bit more powerful. I wanted an MP3 player with A-B repeat so that I can play the same French phrases over and over. After doing a lot of research online, I found the perfect model: the Sony Z Series Video MP3 Player. I immediately drove over to Future Shop to get my hands on it.
And then the nightmares began.
The sales rep who was helping me could not find a proper fitness armband that fit the Sony. “We don’t really carry any accessories for non-iPods.” he explained, “Maybe you should just go with an iPod nowadays. That’s what everybody else has. Or maybe try Best Buy?”
To make a long story short, I ended up driving to FOUR different Best Buys and Future Shops across town. I even tried a few street vendors. Here’s a summary of what I encountered:
- The Sony armband was such an unpopular item that there were discrepancies between their online database and the actual inventory. Both Best Buy and Future Shop were sure that they’d have stock “somewhere” in the lower mainland. But because their staff had shoved aside most non-iPod accessories to make room for more iPod accessories, they just didn’t know where they were.
- Staff members at all four locations told me they too preferred the Sony MP3 player because of its rich features and compatibility, but that the lack of compatible accessories is a real problem.
In the end, I chose to return the Sony MP3 player. I could have ordered the armband over the Internet and waited a week for it to arrive. But as one of the blue shirts at Best Buy put it, “If you are having so much trouble getting a simple armband for it, what kind of support do you think you can get when you need a new accessory in a year?”
I was ready to become a Sony evangelist. I was ready to be different. But unfortunately, my passion was killed by a simple lack of accessories for an otherwise very solid product.
Image credit: Rojer /cc
