Category Development

Why We Use Fuse Basic

Coming from Raincity Studios, I formed a strong bond with the Basic theme. It was there that I learned how to create my first themes with Basic so naturally I was very protective of it when I started here at Fuse. To me, Basic could do no wrong and for the most part that is still true. Fuse was very pro Zen so I knew I had a bit of an uphill battle to get them on board with Basic.

Introducing: Fuse Basic

Here at Fuse we argue from time to time about the best ways to do things in Drupal. Do we go with module 'x' or module 'y? Do we use views or custom code, etc... One of the more heated "debates" we've had lately was which base theme to use. We had been using Zen for a while but Niall, a themer that joined the Fuse team a while back, swears by Basic.

Simple theme colour picker

Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night with a sudden urge to change the header colour of your Drupal site? Us neither, but one of our recent clients felt that they might and we wanted them to be as prepared as possible. At first we were going to go the color module route. Crafting some transparent png's and coding up some bits and bytes to make it all work with the theme we had already built.

Drupal + XSPF

Having worked on many Drupal sites with music players I have used a number of solutions but never quite found something that worked perfectly for me. Recently I have done a number of sites that required the ability to have a play list that is easily managed by the client without messing around with xml files and ftp uploads. There are a couple solutions for this but i am going to focus on one solution which is using the XSPF Playlist module. Step 1: Enable the modules.

Drupal + SlideShowPro

If you aren't yet aware of this, we here at Fuse absolutely love challenges. Building highly interactive websites around the jQuery and jQuery UI libraries allows us to create a great experience while eliminating our reliance on flash.

Drupal Module of the Week: IE Unlimited CSS Loader

During a recent build, we ran into an issue that left us scratching our heads. IE refused to load the main stylesheet. Normally, something like this would be caused by a faulty configuration file, but seeing how all other browsers worked fine, it came down to IE being IE. As it turns out, IE has an undocumented limit of 32 individual stylesheets. Now, this isn't a huge concern for production sites since we compress all stylesheets to keep the load time to the minimum. It is however a problem in a development environment, where IE debugging needs to take place.

Drupal Module of the Week

Our first installment of "Drupal Module of the Week". A weekly post about a new module that we like around the office, currently using in a project, or some that we're even incorporating into our Fuse Drupal Base Install. So right off the bat, we're going to cheat just to get up to speed and cover all the obvious basics. These are the ones that we blindly download for every new Drupal install. Most of us black out and let our auto-pilot click in. The next installment will be a lot more in depth.

Bad FTP!! Go lie down!

FTP has been around for a while. The core functionality for FTP was drafted back in 1972, which in itself isn't that bad as that's when most of the foundation for internet technologies were drafted. But FTP hasn't changed much to keep up with other technologies around it. It's outdated and insecure and you should refuse to use it as a client and ask for it to be removed from you server. Here's why...

Magento… cha ching!

Here at the office, when someone wants a small e-commerce site setup we usually leverage ZenCart. It's well tested and supported and runs countless stores on the web already, but I'm all about change and moving up the stack to the next latest and greatest. Enter Magento.