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4 Jan 2012
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confused-man-in-suit

Drupal vs WordPress: Which to use?

by Christos Filed under: Knowledge

They are both content management systems. One was built specifically for bloggers (which is a pretty large market segment) and the other was built for any arbitrary type of content (which although it is an even bigger market, the ambiguity of it negatively affects awareness of what Drupal can do).

Nonetheless, should large and arbitrary be better than specific? You could convert Drupal into a WordPress blog by just defining your blog post type in Drupal’s database. A commenting system is already there for all types of content. It also has user registrations out of the box with an even more advanced user roles system than WordPress. So why not use it?

If all you want to do is blog, then WordPress is an already customised Drupal installation for you. It will give you all the stats you need and some plugins for the peripheral features you need for your blog.

However if your blog is less than half of your website’s content, then the time you will spend tweaking WordPress is more than the time you will spent tweaking Drupal. The time spent adding new types of content into Drupal is linear, and in most cases it is faster than doing it with plain PHP. It’s main benefit is that it allows non-programmers to edit vast amounts of arbitrary types of content without hassling the developer.

Well, is that good? It depends. If you don’t want the hassle of customer support for content updates to their website, that’s the way to go. However website maintenance might be your milk and bread. That’s arguable though, WordPress can still be configured with plugins like Advanced Custom Fields so that its users have the same level of control over the content.

Both systems have a relatively steep learning curve, I have no side by side comparison but you can assume that you will waste time on both systems to learn about them.

WordPress is a bit better when it comes to version control, as more things will most likely be in PHP files. However Drupal is much more heavily reliant on the database, which makes multiple developers working together on it a big pain. To this day this remains my personal biggest annoyance with Drupal, how would you get a large team of developers to work on the same website?

13 Sep 2011
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teaser

Some funny madness from the office

by Christos Filed under: Community

Last week Tom had to move one of our databases to a new server. While highly concentrated on my scrap paper of todo items, the ambience was broken by Tom’s “complaints” about how slow it was to migrate our 14GB database over to the new server.

But Tom was also very happy, 14GB is a considerably valuable database no?

Well… this is what actually happened:

22 Jun 2011
2 Comments

Cybertill and Magento playing nice

by Christos Filed under: Technology

We’re about to conclude a series of e-commerce sites for a Carp and Match fishing products supplier. One of the main technical challenges faced has been the integration of their Cybertill EPoS system and Magento.

The client’s main concern being that the stock levels that they were maintaining in their Cybertill platform had a 3 hour update delay on their website. If they sold something from their retail shop it wasn’t being reflected online.

To make this a more realtime proposition we had to disable the stock level from decreasing when a new order was placed. Instead querying Cybertill before placing the order.

Our solution turned out better than we hoped. Magento’s excellent theming system allowed us to create a blazing fast AJAX connection for checking the stock levels. If a grouped product has10 different varieties, the product page loads and instead of the regular “Qty” input box, the user gets a “loading spinner” in the 10 table cells.

Then 10 simultaneous AJAX requests fire off to Cybertill and check whether the product is available. If so, the Qty input box comes alive, otherwise, the default “Out of Stock” message fills in the table cell. As Cybertill requests fire off concurrently, it takes about 1 second (instead of 10-15 seconds) to bring all of the data back, which we were very pleased with, as is the client.

Taking into account that the only currently available Cybertill Magento (Ed: that we could find) integration plugin costs over £900, we think we have created a very elegant way of solving the problem. We are now looking into packaging this as a Magento extension from which other people can benefit as well.

Let us know if this extension would be useful to you.

21 Apr 2010
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Twitter + Link Tracking, in one place [product update]

by Christos Filed under: Products

We’ve recently updated the Media Genius Company Tweet application to add another useful feature. You can now convert any URL that you paste in your tweet box into a bit.ly short URL with a single click.

And not only that, once you tweet it, the URL will be saved to create statistics for clicks on the link.

The system even reports the global bit.ly clicks, which are clicks to other bit.ly URLs that point to the same long URL that you used.

The application is called Company Tweet and is one of many social media apps available to all the members of Media Genius. Sign up and install the application to your workspace to start using it.