Richard Castera

What is Drush?

It's a command line shell and scripting interface for Drupal. The Drush Package Manager allows you to download, enable, disable, uninstall, update modules/themes/profiles/translations from the command line in a very simple way (apt-get style) - just type,

 drush dl views 

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Static blocks are a great way to add sections of HTML to your CMS or Catalog pages. I'm going to show you how to add a static block to a CMS page.

It's a 2 step process and a very simple one. First, create your static block by going to CMS->Static Blocks. You will use the identifier of your static block to reference it on the CMS page. Edit the CMS page you would like this block to appear in, and add this code in the location where you would like it to show up:

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When using the LIKE keyword in a MySQL query, I use it the most typical way, LIKE '%STRING%'. One day, I was in need to use a column name instead and could not figure out how to do it! At first, I tried to just replace the string value with the column name like this, LIKE (%t.column%). The end-result was not good as the LIKE keyword expects a string.

So, I thought of trying the CONCAT() function since that returns a string. And it worked!

 LIKE CONCAT('%', t.column) 

Hope this helps someone!

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Ever wanted to get the total price of items in your Magento cart? Here you go:

<?php echo $this->helper('checkout')->formatPrice(Mage::getSingleton('checkout/cart')->getQuote()->getGrandTotal()); ?>

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Since the new release of Magento, people have been encountering a lot of problems. One of them in particular, seem to be the contact form. The error is, "Unable to submit your request. Please, try again later." If you're on Magento 1.4 and get this error when submitting the contact form, that's because your template (theme) is not fully compatible with 1.4. Your Magento theme is overriding the form.phtml file with its own version, which doesn't have the new line in it. Here's what you'll need to do to quickly fix this error:

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For an online retailer, choosing an e-commerce software platform is one of the most important decisions. Depending on the size of the business, the key requirements could vary from robustness and scalability critical for large retailers to the need for simplicity and flexibility for small store owners. Perhaps it is the ability to effortlessly meet the diverse needs of disparate audiences that has made Magento one of the fastest growing e-commerce applications globally. Already, the Magento e-commerce suite has carried out over US$25 billion in transactions via the 30,000+ merchants who rely on this platform, including some from the Internet Retailer Top 500 list. No wonder then that the platform continues to receive international acclaim, most recently from well known research organization Forrester Research which highlighted Magento as 'unique' among various e-commerce technology providers.

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cURL is disabled by default in your XAMPP installation. To enable it, you have to modify the php.ini files in your XAMPP folder. Follow the steps below to get it up and running.

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Web development work should always be done locally. When developing a website, all the development work should be done on a local LAMP Stack environment installed on your computer. That way, the production time is greatly reduced and you can fully test your work before launching.

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Here is a quick way to determine if a user has a specific role

<?php
  // Bring the user object into scope.
  global $user;
  // Check to see if $user has the administrator user role.
  if (in_array('administrator', array_values($user->roles))) {
    // Do something.
  }
?>

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When creating your own Drupal module, you may need to add some styling or Javascript to improve the usability of your module. Here is how to do it.

drupal_add_js(drupal_get_path('module', 'MODULE_NAME') . '/common.js');

Similarly you can add CSS to your module as well

drupal_add_css(drupal_get_path('module', 'MODULE_NAME') . '/styles.css');

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