Building a Drupal site from scratch - part 7 - Theming views

7 November, 2013 | Drupal Development | 4 seen

<p>In <a href="http://reinisfischer.com/building-drupal-site-scratch-part-5-custom-fro… 4</a> in tutorial series how to build a Drupal site from scratch, I am showing how to build views. Now let's upgrade them, by adding additional fields and even CSS style.</p><p>Yes, we will add CSS style directly into our views.</p><p>Lets go back to our view tours (if you are new to this series, please read <a href="http://reinisfischer.com/building-drupal-site-scratch-part-4-creating-v… to create a Drupal views</a>)</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>In part 4 we have already changed Format for Featured blocks to fields, lets apply the same for page display:</p><p><img src="http://reinisfischer.com/sites/default/files/changestyle.JPG&quot; alt="" width="1076" height="434"></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Now lets add some fields to our view:</p><p>By default we already have Title field</p><ul><li>Add Photo field</li><li>Add Body Field</li></ul><div><img src="http://reinisfischer…

Week #5 of blogging 365 days in a row

7 November, 2013 | Blogging | 1 seen

<p>Fifth week of <a href="http://reinisfischer.com/can-you-blog-365-days-row">blogging 365 days in row</a> has already passed away. I need to confess - without future posting feature, nothing wouldn't work out. There are days, I'm not even looking into my blog, don't speaking of writing a content.</p><p>At the end of October I created a dozen of posts, to publish till middle of November. That was smart, right? When you have an inspiration, write, write, write, but don't publish all together, keep it for rainy days.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>So yes, 5th week was on of those rainy day weeks, and Haven't contributed much content - BUT - <a href="http://reinisfischer.com/30-days-twittering-row">I have started to use Twitter</a>, and have gained already 22 followers (up from 5) when I started.</p><p><img src="http://www.reinisfischer.com/sites/default/files/twitter.JPG&quot; alt="" width="539" height="319"></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>During month of November, I'm not using (not looking) any…

Building a Drupal site from scratch - part 6 - Working with blocks

6 November, 2013 | Drupal Development | 3 seen

<p>In <a href="http://reinisfischer.com/building-drupal-site-scratch-part-4-creating-v… 4</a> of this Drupal tutorial series we created a view with block - Features tours. Now is the right time, to do something with this block. And we gonna put this block on our <a href="http://reinisfischer.com/building-drupal-site-scratch-part-5-custom-fro… access blocks section in your Drupal site, head to structure/block:</p><p><img src="http://reinisfischer.com/sites/default/files/featuredtourblock.JPG&quot; alt="" width="1081" height="258"></p><p>Drag this block to Content block area:</p><p><img src="http://reinisfischer.com/sites/default/files/dragblocks.JPG&quot; alt="" width="1052" height="260"></p><p>Be sure to click the save button.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>To make this block availiable only on frontpage, click configure and enter settings as bellow:</p><p><img src="http://reinisfischer.com/sites/default/files/jutfront.JPG&quot; alt="" width="1037" height…

Building a Drupal site from scratch - part 5 - Custom fronpage

5 November, 2013 | Drupal Development | 11 seen

<p>By default Drupal comes with frontpage set to display latest 10 nodes from your site:</p><p><img src="http://reinisfischer.com/sites/default/files/frontpagedrupal.png&quot; alt="" width="632" height="573"></p><p>Which might be ok, if you are runing some blog, but if you are looking the ways how to change default frontpage, you must take a look under system/site-information. In the section default front page it's set to /node (container of your latest posts)</p><p>I'll show one technique I'm using to setup custom, views powered frontpage:</p><p>In previous parts of this tutorial I have already showed <a href="http://reinisfischer.com/building-drupal-site-scratch-part-4-creating-v… to install views and how to create a view</a>&nbsp;</p><p>This time we gonna enable view frontpage from our views page:</p><p><img src="http://reinisfischer.com/sites/default/files/enablefrontpage.JPG&quot; alt="" width="1174" height="327"></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Go to /admin/…

Building a Drupal site from scratch - part 4 - Creating views

4 November, 2013 | Drupal Development | 11 seen

<p>Let's move on with our tourism companies website tutorial.</p><p>In part 1 we created a custom content type - Tours, now it's time to make a few views which will contain data from node related to content type - tours.</p><p>Before creating views - we must download a few modules, to get them work:</p><ul><li><a href="https://drupal.org/project/views">Download Views</a></li><li><a href="https://drupal.org/project/ctools">Download Ctools</a></li><li>Extract both to sites/all/modules</li><li>Enable Views, Views UI modules</li></ul><div>A bried explanation from creators of Drupal views:</div><div><ul><li>You like the default front page view, but you find you want to sort it differently.</li><li>You like the default taxonomy/term view, but you find you want to sort it differently; for example, alphabetically.</li><li>You use /tracker, but you want to restrict it to posts of a certain type.</li><li>You like the idea of the 'article' module, but it doesn't…

10 largest countries by military expenditures 2012

4 November, 2013 | Macroeconomics | 29 seen

In a world shaped by geopolitical dynamics, military spending plays a pivotal role in defining a nation's strategic capabilities. Let's delve into the realm of defense budgets and unveil the top 10 countries that invest significantly in their military apparatus.

1. The World's Top 10 Richest Countries by Military Expenditures:

• United States: $682.478 billion
• China: $166.107 billion
• Russia: $90.749 billion
• United Kingdom: $61.007 billion
• Japan: $59.267 billion
• France: $58.943 billion
• Saudi Arabia: $56.724 billion
• India: $45.785 billion
• Germany: $43.478 billion
• Italy: $34.004 billion

As the chart above illustrates, the United States leads in military spending, a testament to its robust defense budget.

2. GDP Nominal per Capita for Military Expenditures:

• United States: $2.174 thousand
• Saudi Arabia: $2.005 thousand
• United Kingdom: $0.964 thousand
• France: $0.89 thousand
• Russia: $0.632 thousand
• Italy: $0.558 thousand
• Germany: $0.53 thousand
• Japan: $0.464 thousand
• China: $…

Week #4 of blogging 365 days in a row

3 November, 2013 | Blogging | 1 seen

<p>3d week of blogging resulted in 15 blog posts. Nothing much to tell more.</p><p>At the end of 3d week I realized there is need to implement some Twitter strategies, do drive traffic to my blog. Decided to use Twitter strategy for whole month of November.</p><p>&nbsp;</p>

Dauphinoise potatoes

3 November, 2013 | Food blogger | 6 seen

Time by time, I like to experiment with food preparation, this time I decided to make a Dauphinoise potato, inspired by BBC Good Food recipe. 

As it might happen, it happened this time as well - I didn't stick to BBC food preparation methodology.

What did I do?

I sliced potatoes, made a bechamel sauce. Took a pan, made the first layer with bechamel sauce, few rows with sliced potatoes, again bechamel sauce, salt, and pepper, again sliced potatoes. Actually kinda a lasagna from potatoes, right?

Baked for about 1 hour at 200° C... at the end added cheese for toppings.

I liked it. Good with some meatballs. 

Building a Drupal site from scratch - part 3 - Better administration

3 November, 2013 | Drupal Development | 10 seen

Recently I started a tutorial series - How to build a Drupal site from scratch. In part 1 I'm talking about planing a site. In part 2, I'm showing how to make a subtheme from Bootstrap theme. 

Before digging deeper in site customization, I'm willing to show how to tune a little bit up Drupal administrative tasks. By default (out of box) Drupal is not very user friendly for making admin related tasks. But it can be easily solved by adding few (actually just one module)

Administration menu:

From creators:

Provides a theme-independent administration interface (aka. navigation, back-end). It's a helper for novice users coming from other CMS, a time-saver for site administrators, and useful for developers and site builders.

Administrative links are displayed in a CSS/JS-based menu at the top on all pages of your site. It not only contains regular menu items — tasks and actions are also included, enabling fast access to any administrative resource your Drupal site provides.

• Download Admin_menu
• Extract to sites/all/modules
• Enable it from modules page

Building a Drupal site from scratch - part 2 - Applying a subtheme

2 November, 2013 | Drupal Development | 23 seen

Recently I started a tutorial series - How to build a Drupal site from scratch. In part 1 I'm talking about planing a site. In this tutorial I'm giving a real example for building a tourism companies web site for real customer.

In part we learned that it's a wise to create a content type, which best describe products/services we gonna add (in our example tours).

So I have added few tours to our site:

As you can see from picture above, I'm using default Drupal bartik theme. Now is the right time to change it, and start building our own theme.

For this I'm gonna use Bootrap theme, to serve all files, and sub-theme, to theme for our needs. Whats so special in Bootstrap? It's responsive! 

Lets make a sub-theme from Bootstrap:

• Download Bootstrap theme
• Extract it to sites/all/themes folder
• Download Jquey_update module
• Extract Jquery_update module to sites/all/modules folder
• Enable Jquery_update module from modules page
• Enable Bootstrap theme from site appearance page and set as default theme

Today will be announced new Prime minister of Georgia

2 November, 2013 | Living in Georgia | 4 seen

Recently I wrote an article about Georgian press discussing whether the new Prime Minister of Georgia will be David Seergenko.

To this day Georgian Press, has already 3 candidates: David Sergeenko, Irakly Gariabshvili and Giorgi Kvirikashvili.

As I wrote about Georgian president candidates before elections -  I had no clue who is who - so I can confirm, I have no idea who are these guys except some of these or somebody else, will be appointed by Bidzina Ivanishvili (current PM of Georgia).

Either I should interest more about Georgian politics, either - it actually doesn't matters? 

Display YouTube videos on Drupal site with YouTube field module

2 November, 2013 | Drupal Development | 13 seen

Recently I started a new topic series - documentaries, where I publish documentaries I have watched and recommend to watch others. I write a brief description of what each documentary is, and then I embed a YouTube link to show a video on my blog. 

How To Embed YouTube video in Drupal 8 (CKEDITOR)

But lately I started to think of creating my own Screen-casts, and the idea of embedding a video on content didn't satisfy me anymore.

What I wanted - to populate a video in the field, so later by using views I can display video on top of content, not in the content:

To achieve this, I just needed to add one small module and create a new view.

• Download YouTube module
• Extract it to sites/all/modules
• Enable it from modules page
• Add a new YouTube field to your Content type field

I will not write this time how to create a view containing your video, it's too straightforward if you are familiar with views, if not, please leave a comment below, and I'll guide you through in some of my next posts.

First Month Blogging Results: Blog Statistics October 2013

1 November, 2013 | Blogging | 2 seen

As a new blogger, it's exciting to reflect on the progress made in the first month of blogging. I've put in a lot of effort to create content, and it's interesting to see the results.

One of the key metrics to track as a blogger is the number of visitors to the site. In the first month of blogging, I had 39 unique visitors. Although this number may not seem high, it's important to remember that the site was only online from October 10th. With more time, I am confident that the number of visitors will increase.

At this stage, my blog is still very young, and it has a PageRank of N/A. I haven't used much social sharing, so it's expected that the number of visitors would be low. However, 39 unique users for a personal blog in its first month is a good start.

As a blogger, it's important to have goals and expectations for the future. I have thought a lot about the statistics I want to achieve. The goal is to reach 6000 unique visitors by the end of October 2014. However, it's difficult to predict where I will be a year from now.

For the next month, my goal is to attract 150-200 unique visitors. I have decided to try Twitter as a way to drive…

30 days Twittering in a row

1 November, 2013 | Blogging | 4 seen

As you may have noticed, I recently ran a contest for 365 days of consecutive blogging. Now that it's the start of November and I'm brainstorming ways to drive more traffic to my blog, I've decided to give Twitter a try.

The idea is to use Twitter to interact with like-minded individuals and, of course, to promote the content available on my blog. I'm not sure yet whether I'll end up writing a bot to automatically publish tweets to Twitter, but for the next 30 days, I'm committed to manually posting a tweet each day.

Starting my 30-day Twitter contest on November 1st, 2013, I had only five followers on Twitter. By the end of the month, I hope to have 100 followers and at least 50 referrals from Twitter to my website. Does that sound fair enough?

Please follow me: Reinis_Fischer

Getting Started with Building a Drupal Site from Scratch: Content Types, Fields

31 October, 2013 | Drupal Development | 13 seen

Building a website, whether it's using Drupal or not, requires careful planning and consideration. It's important to determine what the purpose of the website is, who the target audience is, and what value it will bring to your business.

For instance, if the website is for a tourism company that offers fishing, hunting, and skiing tours, the first step would be to gather high-quality photos that showcase the destinations and activities offered. This could involve hiring a professional photographer or using photo editing tools.

In addition, the website should also have descriptive descriptions of each tour, which can be written in-house or by hiring a copywriter to make the text stand out. The tours could also be divided into different levels (beginner, intermediate, advanced) to cater to different audiences.

When using Drupal, it's recommended to start with a minimum installation profile rather than a standard one. This will allow for greater flexibility in creating custom content types that are tailored to the needs of the website.

Keep reading to learn more about how to create Content Types and add fields to…