Happy Pixels

Florian Loretan's blog on Drupal, creativity and more

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Wunderkraut is the name of a new company that I co-founded with three fellow developers from the Munich Drupal User Group. I've been lucky to work with them on multiple occasions, and this consolidation of our different skills came as a natural fit. My activities will still consist of doing everything to build kick-ass websites and travelling around the globe to spread the Drupal love, but I will be doing so through Wunderkraut.

The devel_generate module (part of the devel project) is a practical tool to generate test content. The resulting content can be used to test performance and functionality, but it looks very artificial: texts are long homogenous paragraphs, images look like bad modern art paintings. The good news is that we can easily alter the generated content and replace it with more realistic-looking values.

Read the rest of this article on the wunderkraut blog.

I have been inspired by various bloggers to spend some time thinking about the past year and review all the things that happened, what went well, what could be improved, and what I want to change in the future. I've already jotted down my goals for 2011, but this is for another post.

2010 was my first full calender year as a freelancer, and even if I've always had more than enough work, the year started with some cash-flow issues. After a reputable company put me in a lot of trouble by paying my work for a medium-sized project 6 months late, I definitely learned my lesson.

Upgrading Drupal websites from one major version to the next is painful. Most people solve the problem by sticking with the old version, and I've seen a lot of people give up after trying for many days. I've myself done a good amount of (successful) upgrades from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 in the past year and decided to share my experience and hopefully help some people get through with it.

Here are the slides for my presentation Upgrading Drupal at DrupalCamp Vienna and the updated version for FOSDEM and DrupalCamp Spain.

See this article for more details on the upgrade script.

Right after I got my new appartment in Munich, I'm going to head off to Paris for DrupalCon. I'll be getting there a few days early to visit the city and meet with a few people, so let me know if you'll be around and want to pre-drupalize. I won't be presenting this time, so I'll have more time for everything else!

Drupal Media Camp Switzerland took place this week-end, less than a year after the idea of a Swiss DrupalCamp was introduced at a Drupal user group meeting in Zurich. This event was full of good presentations, exciting moments and networking opportunities, and I believe it was very successful in increasing the adoption of the Drupal CMS on the Swiss market.

SimpleTest has brought a technology to Drupal, but also a methodology, both of which have greatly enhanced the Drupal development process. The test automation methodology is common to all testing frameworks. It is the topic of this article and will also serve as an introduction to the Intro to SimpleTest session this Friday at DrupalCon DC.

A user of the HappyPixels theme asked me how to modify the header image, and I thought I would share the response here.

If you download the HappyPixels theme, you might notice a folder named "svg". In this folder, you can find the original SVG document used to create the theme. This document can be edited with the open-source program Inkscape and others like Adobe Illustrator.

I was recently faced with the same problem in two different projects: forcing the creation of an image derivative with imagecache so that it is available in the submit handler of the same form in which the image was uploaded. By default, imagecache generates images on demand triggered by an HTTP request, which is ideal for most cases. However, this design doesn't make it possible to trigger the generation of images programmatically, which is why I created the following code snippet.

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