Articles

Zyxware signs MoU with Computer Society of India (CSI), Trivandrum Chapter for IT Training Programs & Workshops

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Announcements | 1 min read
Zyxware had been working with Computer Society of India(CSI) Trivandrum Chapter to organise workshops and training programs on various technologies. To take this relationship forward, Zyxware Technologies and CSI, Trivandrum Chapter have entered into an MoU. Through this MoU Zyxware and CSI Trivandrum will be partnering with each other to offer training programmes in Information Technology.
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How to add shadow effect to your div blocks with cross-browser compatible CSS

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Technical Solution | 2 min read
Cross browser compatibility is one of the most important concerns of an HTML/CSS developer. Here’s how you can easily add shadow effect to your div blocks with cross-browser compatible CSS. Simply add the below code to the div to which the effect is to be added. You can change the size, strength and direction of the shadow in all browsers, except for IE, in which you can change only the strength and direction of the shadow.
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Drupal Upgrade: How to Migrate data from Ecommerce module to Ubercart in a Drupal site

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Drupal Solution | 7 min read
Ecommerce used to be the preferred ecommerce solution for Drupal before Ubercart came into the picture. We recently worked on upgrading a Drupal 5 site with Ecommerce to Drupal 7 with Ubercart. The challenge with this upgrade was that the source data existed only in the D5 database and the corresponding code to programmatically access the ecommerce data was in D5 as well while the destination tables existed only in the D7 database with the corresponding code existing only in the D7 database. The solution we went with was to go for a full SQL query based migration to copy over the Ecommerce data from its tables to the Ubercart tables.
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Zyxware presents its ideas about IT Enabling Small and Medium Enterprises with Free Software at the ICFOSS Interaction with SMEs

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News | 3 min read
Zyxware was invited to participate in the recently conducted ICFOSS Interaction with Small and Medium Enterprises on SME IT Requirements and FOSS. The meeting was organized at Kochi for SMEs in Central Kerala. At the interaction we presented our ideas about how a Small business can take the first steps towards enabling their businesses with IT. You can see our presentation at the following URL IT Enabling SMEs with FOSS - an introductory presentation
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Drupal Tips: Redirecting after Drupal form submission using form_state redirect without losing pagination and other query strings

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Drupal Technical | 2 min read
The default behavior of drupal_redirect_form in Drupal 6 is to redirect the user to $_GET['q'] when an explicit redirect location is not set in $form_state['redirect']. So any form submission from a Drupal page with additional querystrings like in a paginated form (for example admin content listing forms or admin comment listing forms) will result in the querystrings being lost. This can be frustrating when you administer content from such forms as you have to click the pager link and go back to the previous page after form submission. This can easily be fixed by adding a submit handler for the form in question and setting form_state redirect correctly.
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Drupal Tweaks: A better comment moderation system for Drupal 6 using form_alter on the default comment administration form

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Drupal Technical | 3 min read
The default comment moderation system in Drupal 6 is crude at best primarily because of the limitation of the admin comment listings. The information that is shown by default are 'Subject', 'Author', 'Posted in', 'Time' and 'Operations'. Now the main objective of comment moderation is to reject spam comments. None of these fields give any information about whether the comment is a spam comment or not and you will have to view each comment by going to the edit view of the comment and then approve or reject the comment. This is a very laborious and frustrating process. You have three options to solve this problem and get a better comment administration interface - one is to create a comment view, another is to alter the default comment administration form and the third is of course a custom solution for comment administration.
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Solution to APC / PHP Warning: Unknown: Unable to allocate memory for pool. in Unknown on line 0

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Technical Solution | 3 min read
APC or Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a free and open opcode cache for PHP. APC allows for caching of opcode generated during PHP script parsing and execution by the Zend engine. If you are using APC 3.1.9 and you are using the default configuration you might run into the error where most PHP requests will return a warning message "PHP Warning: Unknown: Unable to allocate memory for pool. in Unknown on line 0"
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[Drupal 7][Views 3.x] How to programmatically render a view display passing exposed filter inputs via code using $view->exposed_input

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Drupal Technical | 2 min read
This is how you would normally render a view display passing filter inputs via code: $view = views_get_view('view-name'); $view->set_display('display-name'); $view->is_cacheable = FALSE; $filter_1 = $view->get_item('display-name', 'filter', 'filter_1_id'); $filter_2 = $view->get_item('display-name', 'filter', 'filter_2_id'); $filter_1['value'] = "value1"; $filter_2['value'] = "value2"; $view->set_item('display-name', 'filter', 'filter_1_id', $filter_1); $view->set_item('display-name', 'filter', 'filter_2_id', $filter_2); dpm($view->render());
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Drupal Performance Tips: Prevent spam bots from posting to your Drupal site and prevent server loads due to repeated posts

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Drupal Technical | 2 min read
One of the Drupal sites we maintain had recently started slowing down considerably in spite of the site mostly being static and in spite of boost set up on the server. On examination of the site we found that two things were happening on the site. One was that the site was being crawled indiscriminately by rogue crawlers. This we solved using the DDOS deflate script and setting DDOS deflate to run every 10 seconds. The second problem was that there were some bots which were continuously sending POST requests to /comment/cid/reply pages. For this we had to come up with a workaround.
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[Drupal] Adding slashes to the end of virtual directory names in Drupal using htaccess rules

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Drupal Technical | 2 min read
In Drupal every path in the site goes via index.php and goes through some Drupal menu. However to make the Drupal application behave live a typical static website in terms of URL architecture sometimes clients request for adding slashes to the end of virtual direcotry paths. At the same time slashes would not look good at the end of virtual file paths. There is an easy way to do this using apache htaccess rules
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How to print a block inside a node on a Drupal 6 website

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Drupal Technical | 3 min read
Blocks are regions on a Drupal website that show small but significant pieces of content. Blocks are an important component from the perspective of a Drupal website. Blocks are usually assigned to regions in a page and they are supposed to be printed on a page. However there are many instances where you might want to print a block within a content. It is not directly possible to assign a block to a region within content (node in Drupal speak) as you can do with a page. But as with everything in Drupal there is a way to do that.
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Drupal Tips: The quick and dirty way to run Drupal site updates

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Drupal Technical | 4 min read
Sometimes we get requests to update Drupal sites and get it done in less than 5 hours. If we take the Drupal update through the full fail-safe set of steps for Drupal updates we will never be able to complete updates in less than 5 hours on a site we don't maintain. For such sites when the cost of the site going down may not be too high for the site owner it might not be too big an issue if the update is run on a hit or miss approach. We normally do not recommend such an approach but this should work on most small sites without any issues.
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Drupal Tips: How to update Drupal core and contributed modules in your Drupal site safely

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Drupal Technical | 3 min read
Keeping the Drupal core and contributed modules up-to-date (at least on the security updates) is one of the essential steps for keeping a Drupal site safe and secure. Running updates of Drupal modules is usually a straightforward mechanism on a Drupal site that is done right. However what will you do if you do not know how things have been built? What will you do if some of the custom modules used are tied down to specific versions of some contributed module? What if there were custom changes on the site. Here is how you can run updates on a Drupal site almost completely safely.
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Drupal Checklist - Information to be collected before you migrate your Drupal site from one server to another

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Drupal Solution | 3 min read
When you want to move a Drupal site from one hosting server to another you have to ensure that the site works the same way on the new server as it used to work on the old server. There is no real fool proof way of doing this other than to meticulously document all the custom aspects associated with setting up the site and verifying it on the new server. The following is a checklist of information you have to collect before you move your Drupal site from one server to another. Checklist: Migrate from one server to another
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How to backup/copy/synchronise a full folder lying on a remote server, onto another (local/remote) machine easily using rsync in linux

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Technical Solution | 2 min read
”rsync” is an open source utility in Linux/Unix primarily used for synchronising files/directories over the networks. You can also use it to backup/copy folders between machines. It is particularly made use of to while administering servers connected to the internet. The term “rsync” itself refers to “remote-synchronise”.
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