Planet Drupal

Today we tackle another real-life example of use-cases in the area of location based services (LBS). The question recently posed to us was this: knowing that Drupal's IP Geolocation module is great at retrieving and mapping location information, can we channel its power to analyse where purchases from our online store originate from, compared from one season to next?
The answer is: yes we can. And here is how.

Apart from ready-to-use maps of your site's visitor locations, the IP Geolocation module also comes with an API to help you realise location based services on your site. Here we consider the use-case of a travelling writer who updates a blog during her journey across the globe. With IP Geolocation and a few lines of code we are able to automatically insert at the top of each new entry the location the writer is blogging from, even if she isn't quite sure herself where she is today!

To create a variation of an existing theme, you could simply copy the desired theme's directory to sites/all/themes change the theme name in a a couple of places and start hacking away. But duplication is a waste of disk space. More importantly it creates an unnecessary maintenance overhead: if an improved version of the original theme comes out, you'll have to merge it with the changes you made in the various files of the overridden version.

We came across the lovely little Slidebox module for the first time via Jeff Eaton's Monday Module blog. We loved it and installed it on flink. If you're not sure what we're talking about just scroll to the bottom of this page and pay attention to the bottom right. Slidebox is clever, lean and simple in its design.

Site maintainers can give you many good reasons for using Drush, I give you one: drush up.

This one command alone will save you the 60 seconds investment of your time now many times over. drush up automatically downloads the latest and greatest versions of all modules on your site, including contributed modules as well as a full core upgrade, then runs the update script. And just in case something goes wrong, it first backs up the entire source of your site.

If you're using shared hosting, you may not have control over your master php.ini file, which amongst other things is used to set the maximum amount of memory your site is allowed to use. In addition, your D7 sites/default/settings.php has this line

   ini_set('memory_limit', '64M');


When you look closely you'll find that the main pages on http://flink.com.au are "framed" differently from tab to tab. The differences include the background used as well as the note and yellow "sticky" images in the upper right corner. The variations cannot be established via blocks or panels. Yet there's only one active theme.

How did we do this?