Choose Your Weapon Wisely
Written by Howard Chang on May 5, 2011
In a perfect world, every web project would be built on powerful technologies that are easy to deploy, easy to use, and easy to maintain. In the real world, however, you will never find a technology that offers all that, and it is critical to decide which development tool to use before starting a project. Choosing the right tool will cut down on development time and ensure the final product’s scalability (ability to handle an increasing amount of work in a graceful manner).
Content management systems (CMSs) and model-view-controller (MVC) frameworks are two types of tools that are used by SmarttNet to build web applications and websites. I will review three examples of these tools by looking at the following areas:
- The back-end user interface (UI) for average users (for example, the type of person who uses online banking).
- The development and maintenance of web projects.
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
