I’ve just finished reading “Creating Concrete5 Themes” book by Remo Laubacher.

I decided to read this book not because I don’t know how to create concrete5 themes, but because I need a manual resource by hand that I could refer my assistant (junior developer) to. Especially if I hire somebody who is rather good at php/html/css, but not familiar with concrete5 yet. Explaining everything by myself is time consuming and waiting for the developer to learn concrete5 from scratch takes some time as well. A good step-by-step tutorial is a great thing to have for such case. [Read more]

Developers often have to do some work related to database, such as backups, database edits, etc. But usually the clients don’t even know what is MySQL database and where to get the database access details, they usually give just FTP or hosting control panel access.

Even if you have access to hosting cPanel, there might be a number of databases and you might need just one database related to a certain website/application. For example: magento.

So, let’s assume we have FTP access and we don’t know the database credentials, but we need to perform a database backup. Where do we find the database access details?

Go to ‘/app/etc/’ directory and open the file ‘local.xml’.

            <default_setup>
                <connection>
                    <host><![CDATA[localhost]]></host>
                    <username><![CDATA[magento]]></username>
                    <password><![CDATA[magento]]></password>
                    <dbname><![CDATA[magento]]></dbname>
                    <initStatements><![CDATA[SET NAMES utf8]]></initStatements>
                    <model><![CDATA[mysql4]]></model>
                    <type><![CDATA[pdo_mysql]]></type>
                    <pdoType><![CDATA[]]></pdoType>
                    <active>1</active>
                </connection>
            </default_setup>

Here you can see all the data u need:
see host, username, password and the dbname nodes in the xml structure.
[Read more]

If you get this error while trying to execute a bash/shell script (.sh)

/bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: no such file or directory

Then you should check the EOL (end of line) format of your script and convert that to Unix (for example, notepad++ can do it: Edit -> EOL conversion)

Just a note for myself, but maybe will help somebody too.:-)

To enable HTTPS in Drupal:

Go to ‘site building’ -> secure pages:

• enable secure pages;
• set up rules;
• don’t forget to add rules for css and javascripts, otherwise you will get notices in browsers saying that some content is not secured.

For those who is just looking to select a concrete5 theme for his/her website, I’ve prepared another bundle pack. This one is different from the concrete5 themes pack I created before and the installation process should go even faster.

[Read more]

I often work with 3rd party code and I’m often confused by so much html code. SEO professionals know that text/code ratio is very important so you should save every byte of code when it’s possible. Today I want to focus on image tag and the ways people use it in a bad (or just not good) way.

Example #1:
<img src="file.jpg">

It’s short (no much html code). But wrong. Try to validate such code against W3C rules and you’ll know what XHTML code requires self-closing tag and the "alt" attribute is required for "img". So, the correct way for this would be at least:

<img src="file.jpg" alt="" />
[Read more]

I got the following question through the "Ask me a question" form:

Hey, why do my players keep losing points ? like with passing and stuff

[Read more]

Every web developer will face with this question some time. Some prefer to create workarounds, some are searching for ready solutions over world wide web. I really like jQuery and use its power and simplicity to perform tasks like scrolling the page down or top to a certain place.

[Read more]

I’ve created a bundle pack with 10 free concrete5 themes found on smartwebprojects.net. Download it here: http://www.denisvlasov.net/concrete5-themes-pack1.zip
[Read more]

How I love gmail! That’s really the best free service I could ever imagine. Even if they read all my emails, I don’t care.:) Gmail saves my time significantly now. Especially when the ‘Tasks’ feature has been added. You can have your TODO just with your gmail web application. Everything under hand, very convenient. So how I use gmail to manage my time:
[Read more]