Hello 2015! Hopes, resolutions and things to look forward to for the new year

For those of you that know me, you’ll know that I’d have a lot to say about 2014. It’s been a strange year. I won’t go into it in this blog post, but instead I’m going to look forward and welcome 2015 with wide eyes and big open arms. Come in and make yourself at home, 2015! So, here are a few things I’d like to look forward to in the new year. ...

31 December, 2014

DrupalCon 2013: Summary of Dries Buytaert's Keynote

DrupalCon 2013 is well underway now with Dries giving his keynote earlier today. There are lots of exciting things coming up with Drupal 8, and it’s a big change both technically and conceptually from the previous releases. I’ll attach the full keynote below, but here’s a quick summary for you speedy readers. There are six key initiatives in Drupal 8 which Dries quickly covered: Configuration management Mobile Blocks Multilingual Views in core Web services ...

24 September, 2013

Book Review - Instant E-commerce with OpenCart: Build a Shop [Instant] by Murat Yilmaz (Packt Publishing)

I’ve just been going through my first ‘Instant’ book from Packt Publishing - Instant E-Commerce with OpenCart: Build a Shop [Instant] by Murat Yilmaz. They kindly sent me a copy to review, so here’s a quick summary of what to expect and what’s included: This book is for web developers and designers looking at setting up an online store. You don’t need any previous experience of OpenCart to follow the walkthroughs in the book, but you will need to be reasonably confident (or at least willing to have a bash) at downloading and setting up a web application on a server or a local development environment (such as WAMP for MS Windows or MAMP for Mac). ...

2 July, 2013

Upcoming book review: Instant E-commerce with OpenCart: Build a Shop [Instant]

Packt Publishing were kind enough to ask me if I’d like to review one of their latest OpenCart books: ‘Instant E-commerce with OpenCart: Build a Shop [Instant]’ by Murat Yilmaz. It’ll be the first time I’ve read a book in their ‘Instant’ series, as I’ve reviewed a couple of their regular books before, so I’ll be interested to see how it compares. Check back soon for my full review.

28 June, 2013

MAMP: "#2006 - MySQL server has gone away" while importing database

I was importing a relatively large Drupal database today into MAMP (via phpmyadmin) and MySQL rudely walked off, with the following error: #2006 - MySQL server has gone away Ah, a nice vague error message! It seems that the import statement (from the cache_menu table) in the database dump contains packets which are too large to import using the default MAMP settings. To fix this, I created a my.cnf file in my /Applications/MAMP/conf/ folder with the following contents:...

21 June, 2013