Geshan's Blog

YoungInnovations Private Limited, in the course of 2 years have focused on continuous improvement on our work process to deliver the best service we could. We work mostly on open source products and believe in promoting open source.


So, below are the 5 reasons or the things we do differently that gives us an edge over other software houses:

CodeIgniter is a Model View Controller (MVC) based open source web application framework for use in building dynamic web sites with PHP. It has a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications.

More About CI

Its goal is to enable you to develop projects much faster than you could if you were writing code from scratch, by providing a rich set of libraries for commonly needed tasks, as well as a simple interface and logical structure to access these libraries. For more information see Codeigniter's official website.

As mentioned above the libraries play a great role when you develop your application in Codeigniter. What really helps you ignite your code, if you are a beginner is the amazing user guide CodeIgniter can boast about. CodeIgniter is most often noted for its speed when compared to other PHP frameworks, see some comparisons here.

The Libraries

1. EZAuth

Almost all web applications needs an authentication system and there are lots of options for CodeIgniter, among them EZAuth is a great library to complete the work. The developer defines EZAuth as "EzAuth is an open source robust PHP/MySQL user database, authorization, access control list and user session management system all bundled into one solution. Before you reinvent the wheel trying to manage users on your website, try out EzAuth. Oh yeah, we built it with CodeIgniter so you’ll need that too."

You can view the user guide of EZAuth to know more about it, the current version is 0.6.

2. Ocular

Ocular is by far the best templating library for CodeIgniter, I have used Yet Another Templating System (YATS) but Ocular is amazing. It is a Rails inspired template library following convention over configuration.  It is hosted at Google Code and with features like multiple template, partial views, content Yeild its a great library that will meet almost all your templating needs. With CSS and JS aggregation for production in the new version 1.0, its the best for CI for now.

3. DataMapper

CodeIgniter does not come with any native Object Relation Mapper (ORM) library but I could found out  IgnitedRecord and DataMapper , after using both to some extent I'd recommend DataMapper. The Over Zealous Edition has some better features than the Datamapper older versions. DataMapper needs the database to be in fifth normal form, and there are some other requirements you can see here.



It is designed to map your Database tables into easy to work with objects, fully aware of the relationships between each other. The use of an ORM framework help you a lot, you have an edge over the native Active Record style of coding. Moreover it is more Object oriented with data persistence and as your tables become objects they know the relationships you defined which makes the Create Read Update Delete (CRUD) process easier.

Conclusion

CodeIgniter core has a big list of libraries from form to image manipulation to validation but the above external libraries make it easier to focus more on productivity and creativity and less on the code part of it. You can download and use all the above libraries in your CodeIgniter install, from the relative links.Try out some other fresh libraries by Elliot Haughin, here.

You can find many libraries for codeIgniter, but above there where the ones I liked when I used it and compared it with similar libraries.

Happy Code Igniting and library hunting :).

At d.o the problem was described as "If you are using Drupal 6, you must currently install the 6.x-1.x-dev version of Custom Pagers, as there is a serious bug in 6.x-1.10-beta1 (when used with Views, it only shows up to 10 items, no matter what)." , here in this node.

Non Obvious Solution

The problem had a non obvious solution we discovered with trial and error. The ray of hope was "Pager Node List" array for each custom pager which took array of Node ids to show the custom pager, so the round way solution was as follows:

 The full blog post at YIPL Blog here, my blog posts for YIPL are at: http://www.younginnovations.com.np/blogs/geshan.

After Mero mobile turning into Ncell another surprise was coming, the shift of timing and increment in load shedding hours. Now its 12 hours per day, the schedule when the light goes out is below:

Load Shedding Schedule 12thMar2010 Kathmandu Nepal (12 Hrs/day)

The government has said, this year load shedding will not be more than 12 Hours per day, lets see what's in store for us.

The more I write about Drupal, the more I want to. The more I compliment Drupal, the more I'd like to. But this blog post is about how to list your Drupal website on some of the (other Drupal) websites to get you more exposure and more traffic equating to more lead and sales.

Arguably Drupal is the best open source content management system out there, Drupal project usage statistics here show around 40 thousand downloads a day for Drupal core (including 5x, 6x and 7x alpha releases) for last 6 months or so. The 5 websites listed below are basically ideal places to showcase your Drupal site that you have build.

Among the 40 thousand downloads if only 1% are deployed live daily we will have around 4 hundred new Drupal websites every day and these websites need some publicity, promotion and exposure so below are the (other Drupal) websites that list and showcase Drupal websites.

1. Drupal.org Showcase Forum

Without doubts, you can't get more publicity about Drupal anywhere else than Drupal.org. The drupal.org forum "Showcase" section here gives you a place to list your website and let all other Drupalites see it comment on it and suggest you changes. If you are a member of d.o (which you might be as you are reading this blog post) then you can post about your website/web application or web project built in Drupal here. It is just a forum so you don't have the option to post any screenshots but it works fine. If you follow the guidelines given here, and land in the Drupal.org homepage then you might get more traffic than you would have expected.

2. www.DrupalSites.net

Drupalsites.net can be termed the unofficial Drupal website listing and showcasing website. Its the ultimate Drupal website directory with currently 4043 websites listings. Its also easy you can register, login with Open ID or your Drupal.org username as well. After you login you can add your Drupal website here. It's easy and your website is listed instantly just remember to take a screenshot of your website of at least 600x600px to upload to DrupalSites.net.

3. www.Drupalsn.com

Drupalsn.com is short for Drupal Social Network a very good website for Drupalites of all types developers, themers, module users etc. The project page of DrupalSN here showcases all the projects submitted by website members. After you sign up and login, you can submit your drupal project here. A good thing about DrupalSN as DrupalSites.net is that the project is shown instantly after you submit it without moderation. Showcasing Drupal projects is just one part of DrupalSN, you can post a question or a resource link to the website which can help other fellow Drupal users.

4. DrupalMa.com and 5. DrupalMuseum.com

I have put two websites DrupalMa.com and DrupalMuseum.com here together because the way they funtion are same, both the websites do not allow users to directly submit their website and only showcase "the best well designed Drupal based websites" or in other words "websites that are pleasing to the eye, as well as useful". So you can submit your Drupal website to DrupalMa.com here or DrupalMuseum.com here but if your website does not meet the above criteria then your website will not be listed on the showcase. If you think you have a great designed website try submitting to the two sites mentioned above :), best of luck ;).

Bonus: www.DrupalWebsites.com

Last and may be the least, DrupalWebsites.com is a Drupal 5 website that also works in a similar fashion as Drupalsites.net but seems to be a little old now. It also has a Drupal Module for Drupal 5 to submit websites but I have not used it, so I can't really tell how it functions. You can login with Open Id as well and this listing directory website will also need your website's screenshot to list your website. This site should really work on its design and upgrade and update.

Conclusion

Listing website in other reputed websites really helps you promote your website, back linking, link sharing can benefit your Search Engine Optimization and your website visit by referring websites.

So, after you make your Drupal Website live don't forget to add them to the above sites to get more traffic, more lead and more sales :). Happy Drupaling.

Recently for a project we were developing, we had a need to show top X bloggers may be top 5 or top 10 bloggers in a block and after some Googling and searching the drupal.org (d.o) site I could not find anything that fit our needs.

The need for a module

Then I decided to write a module that will solve the problem but in a dynamic and flexible way and came up with the idea for Top X Contributors module. If you want to download the module and try it, you can download it here or take a look at the code at GitHub.com here.

What does it do?

The module is very simple, it just shows the top X (X - no. of authors/contributors to show which is configurable) contributors in a HTML list in form of a block for each content type in your Drupal site. Something like below:

Step to follow

Download the module here, and follow the instruction to show the top - "Content Type" contributors block where content type is any node type you want be it blog, page or a custom type you created like news or event anything.

Steps

1. Install the module (copy it to your sites/all or sites/all/custom folder)
2. Turn on the module from SITEURL/admin/build/modules - or use drush :)
3. Then change the settings as per your need: at admin/settings/topxcontributors - as shown below:
   
   
   
   
4. Go to the blocks page SITEURL/admin/build/block/list - and place the newly generated blocks in the block regions you want. (if you want configure the blocks and change the title to whatever you like for example : Top 5 bloggers).
   
   
   
   (Click to Enlarge)
5. And you are done. See the output as in the first picture above "Steps to follow"

Improvements

I wanted each node type's contributor or author count to be configurable but that above module solved our problem for now so it will not be done for now. If anyone wants to contribute contact me or comment below and help me in GitHub. Any help will be appreciated, I'll try for a CVS account at Drupal as well yet again.

Conclusion

I hope the module solves a very small but common problem in Drupal in many community and blogs this might be a very needed and sought after feature but not achieved easily. If views could have done it, it would have been amazing but none the less here is a solution for you all to try out.

I have tried to give out what I had developed internally for YIPL hope it helps someone. :) Happy Drupalling.