PHP
Web Development Estimates - This "Stuff" Ain't Easy
If I had a dollar for every time a potential client told me how easy web development is, or asked me to estimate the re-development of a Facebook-like website after a ten minute phone call I could travel around the world for a couple months. It it was easy to estimate and develop web applications (or any IT project for that matter) over 60% of projects wouldn't fail.
Drupal errors "Notice: Undefined index: profile in..."
Solution:
Ah the joy of procedural programming in a weakly typed language.
There are two issues here:
1. Drupal is reporting notices
2. Datastructure mismatches
The particular above notice is created when php tries to access a index of an array where the variable is not holding an array. In general this notice will not cause problems with Drupal functionality. You may want to turn off php reporting notices. To do this you can change php's error reporting.
In php.ini use:
error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE
In .htaccess user:
php_value error_reporting 2039
Customizing the User Profile Layout in Drupal
As Drupal becomes more popular and grows its open-source development community, more websites are turning to it as a solution for creating extremely powerful online communities, allowing users to submit their own content to a community hub. The power of these hubs is obviously their users and creating an organized, easy to use interface can be the difference between failure and success.
Format dates in Drupal
Drupal provides a clean way of formatting dates any way you want throughout the entire site.
Earlier today, Rachel commented that an upcoming events block on a site we are working on displayed the date in an ugly format. So I changed it and for anyone who is interested, here is the step-by-step process for doing so.
1. Create a date string
Drupal vs. WordPress
I've recently been researching the differences between content management systems and blogging engines and thought I would discuss some key differences I've found in Drupal and WordPress. LevelTen has experience installing, configuring and theming both and each has its strengths and weaknesses. I feel the deciding factors come down to your long-term goals for the application.
Rolling out our distribution of Drupal
Pardon the stream of thought post. I'm getting ideas out of my head on a project. Some of these ideas will be used later.
Tom and I have been working hard for the last couple of months on creating a distribution of Drupal. We put the initial alpha release for download on our site this weekend.
Iterative vs. Fixed-bid Projects
For those of you familiar with a traditional project management process, you’re probably familiar with a typical project life cycle- plan, budget, design, develop, test and release, AKA waterfall. This style of management can typically be found in fixed-bid projects. You may be less familiar with the percentage of projects that utilize this management process, yet fail to stay within the project’s intended time line, budget and scope.
According to the “Chaos Report”, a project management study on software development companies:
…35 percent of software projects started in 2006 can be categorized as successful, meaning they were completed on time, on budget and met user requirements. This is a marked improvement from the first, groundbreaking report in 1994 that labeled only 16.2 percent of projects as successful…
35 percent! Almost two out of every three software development or integration projects are failures. If you are not planning on selling services or merchandise on your site, collecting customer data or statistics, or updating site content via a content management system, you can probably rest assured your project will not be a total failure. However, if you are planning on utilizing any or all of these features into your website, I highly recommend you continue reading.
How to keep osCommerce Session ID's on non-store pages.
Solution:
Instead of using the standard link convetion: <a href="new-page.php">
Use the following format: <a href="<?=tep_href_link('new-page.php')?>">
If you really want to get creative and are looking at SEO specifically you can create custom pages for each product category by copying the index.php page and saving it as new-category-specific-index.php page. This page will function just like the default index.php page in osCommerce, to have the page return only the specific category you need, you'll need to use the following code:
<a href="<?=tep_href_link('new-category-specific-index.php','cPath=28')?>">
Remember to change the cPath=28 to the actual desired category or you'll get all the products.
Budgeting for Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
There are a tremendous amount of variables to consider when looking at developing a search engine marketing budget for your company. Even marketing managers may have a difficult time assessing how well their company’s website is doing and more over the direction and resources they need, in order to make it highly visible in the search engine result pages (SERPS).
