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Technology

Overview of Google authentication methods

There are a number of different authentication methods available for integrating with Google Apps.  These include OpenID, OAuth and SAML amongst others.  At a first glance, it's not always entirely clear on the differences between them and when you may wish to use one over another.  Here's a brief overview which hopefully makes this a bit clearer.

Technology

Ubercart: modifying checkout panes

The Ubercart module is one of the best e-commerce options for Drupal currently. It is very user friendly and highly flexible with administrators having control over the product catalogue, payment gateways and email notifications. Site administrators also have control over which checkout panes are displayed during checkout and the order in which they appear.

Technology

Migrate module: file handling

So you're migrating pages and users from another CMS to Drupal using the Migrate module, but how do you handle all those file attachments? This example will cover taking the input filename and adding it to an imagefield on a Drupal content type. However, this should work in exactly the same way for filefields too.
Technology

Modifying your site's email "From" header

By default, all email sent from your site uses the site email address configured at admin/settings/site-information as the "from" address. On most sites this is set to something generic, like "webmaster@example.com" or "noreply@example.com". However in a lot of mail clients, when the email reaches your inbox, it appears as being just from "webmaster" or "noreply". Wouldn't it be better if it appeared as being from "Your site" or whatever you have set your site name to be?

Technology

Drupal hits Belfast!

Less than a month after DrupalCon Paris and I'm back from an awesome Drupal Camp in Belfast. It was a jammed pack couple of days with two presentation tracks, along with break out rooms, a documentation sprint and usability testing. Oh and a very successful Drupal Surgery too. Over 50 people attended and came from all over Ireland, as well as from Scotland and England.

Technology

Coder Module: Upgrading your code to Drupal 7

Drupal 7 code freeze is almost upon us, and you may now be considering upgrading your modules and themes. To make that process as easy as possible, I've been working hard to update the Coder module with all the necessary Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 reviews to help you identify where in your module or theme you need to make changes.

Technology

Migrate module: handling encrypted passwords

Last month I blogged about using the Migrate and TableWizard modules to migrate users and nodes from the CMS Made Simple content management system to Drupal. Since then I've been using them more and more and have implemented a number of the migrate hooks to manipulate the data during the migration process.
Technology

Using Chaos Tools module to create exportables

Recently I created a patch for the migrate module so you can export content sets, paste them into your module and have them automatically imported. This works in much the same way as Views handles default views in code, with the version in the database overriding the version in code. Using the Chaos Tools (ctools) module it was, relatively, easy to add this functionality. Here are the steps involved if you want to add it to your own module.

Technology

CiviCRM Developer Camp

This week I went to CiviCRM Developer Camp in London, UK. I must admit I've never used CiviCRM and downloaded and installed it for the first time the day before! The camp, which was un-conference in style, was held over two days, and over 20 people attended. It was meant to be a camp for experienced users, but given the varying degrees of knowledge of the people attending, I think it was less techy or advanced than originally intended.