It is good to see the buzz in Drupal Delhi community. I can see people are planning a meetup in January 2012 first week. Good to see activity from Drupal enthusiast in Delhi. Drupal seems to have good future in web development. Client's these days do there research before getting their website developed from vendors. Drupal has some solid portfolio with many big websites running on Drupal. When it comes to content management system Drupal offers many advantages over other CMS. I personally love Drupal because of its flexibility and speed with which we can develop a feature. It has thousands of modules that can pretty much do most of the common things required for creating any web portal.

2011 is about to end and next year will be exciting for me. I will be starting a Free Drupal Video Podcast and there will be a completely different website for that. I am going to put all my energy on this. I can see that there is a gap when it comes to good drupal training provider in India. Especially in Delhi. My focus and goal is to promote Drupal to as many people as I can. The new website will be targetted for that purpose only. Besides that from the month of Jan I will start organizing free Drupal Workshops in various colleges in NCR region. These days students are busy with the end term examinations so by next month everyone will be free to attend these workshops. I am super excited and gearing up for the next year!!

I wish everyone a very prosperous happy new year!!

I am finally uploading the pics I took during Drupal Camp on 7th November. I was amazing to see and listen to Dries's Keynote(Drupal creator).

click on the pics below for enlarged view!

I have not been updating my blog regularly for the past couple of weeks. BAD. Not good. Sorry for that. So here are the quick updates I can remember.

1. I got Hair Cut after 4 months, though I still have above average hair length and I am growing more.
2. I shaved yesterday.
3. I am working on super cool features on www.ggsipu.info and I am sure it will help the students a lot. The features I am adding on the site will help the students in getting more marks in their exams. Yeah simple but killer. What else could a student ask for? :)
4. I am NOT taking any new projects. The main reason behind it that the money is not worth my time and working on projects for other people is like a job. That's not what I want in life. I am a free bird, I do whatever I like. I don't like anyone bossing me. Now I say no first to clients and I only only select projects that are really challenging and the client is willing to pay good money for my great work :) (Self promotion)
5. I am working on Free Drupal Videos these days and I will be posting them real soon. This will help other who want to learn Drupal and all the videos will be Free of Cost. Yes, thats true.

Need to stop now, today is KarvaChauth so need to do lot of household tasks. Bye.

Couple of months back I started creating Drupal Podcasts which I made available for everyone to watch for free. I published 2 of them on our website www.sparxsys.com , I created more podcasts but they all need editing. I was budy delivering projects to my clients and I couldnt finish them. Now I am totally focussed on them. I have started the work on it. I have created more Drupal Podcasts. If you have any suggestions for me then do write to me at ravi at ravisagar dot in and let me know what topic you would like to learn. I will be very happy to create a free podcast. In my earlier to podcast I focussed on basic Drupal stuff. In my next podcasts I will create screencasts on Views and CCK, the most powerful and useful Drupal Modules.

To make the videos interesting and meaningful I will take the example of some real case. It may be inspired by my Drupal experience of the past years. Working for client projects under pressure teaches you lot of things.

I can openely say that Drupal changed my life in a big way. It enabled me to fulfill my dreams and I made many portals using Drupal. I started working for clients and I worked only in Drupal. I want to promote Drupal to as many students as I can. In the past 2 year I have been organizing workshops in colleges and companies. People regularly calls me and ask me to give them training on Drupal. I have provided online training to some people but it is kind of difficult. Not everyone has a reliable and fast internet connection in India yet.

To bridge the gap I will make Drupal training short video podcasts and I hope people can benefit from them. Moreover it will be completely free for anyone to watch online!!

Good bye for now and remember I reachable at ravi at ravisagar dot in and I will be very happy to answer your queries about this Drupal Podcast.

In the last couple of days I have received few calls from people and the first thing they said to me - I need to get a website developed in Drupal. I need a Drupal website. Mujhe Drupal mein site banwani hai. I was so happy to hear that. More people want to get their website developed in Drupal now. I think people these days search on the net and learn about various web technologies and Drupal of course offers amazing features over other CMS. I am not saying that other CMS are not good but Drupal has its own advantages and that is why at Sparxsys Solutions we only work on Drupal. Also I have noticed that their are many companies now who are shifting their base to "Drupal Only". More competetion for us for sure, but it is in a way a good thing for us. The price, service and the value we give to our client, I am sure no other company can do that, at least in Delhi

and NCR region (shameless self promotion) :)

Also good to know that people are migrating to Drupal too. Either they want to get their website moved to Drupal or want to re-develop

it again in Drupal.

Cool!

Finally I have ugraded my website from D5 to D6 and now I just cant stop myself from writing blogs more often :) This task was long pending and I was running away from doing it. Yes, I was little nervous and changing something that you love so much is difficult. Thsi site, my blog was my test platform for learning Drupal. I spent countless hours on the site and trying so many things here.

I am thinking a lot these days about updating this site. Actually I was confused whether I migrate the content to a new Drupal installation or upgrade this site to D6. Migrating existing content is tough but it will be easier for me to manage the site but Upgrading the site will take time but will preserve the existing blogs, comments and tags.

I will update this site to D6 then!

Installation of Admin Menu using Drush on a clean drupal site. For more videos check www.sparxsys.com (Drupal Consultation and Training)

If you use drupal then you should install drush. It is basically a very nice collection of scripts that saves lot of time like downloading, installing and enabling modules. With just single command you can do all that once. Thats not it! It does a lot of things. Just read the the documentation here http://drupal.org/project/drush

How to install drush on dreamhost!

Here is another super cool module for making your Drupal Development life much easier. Every Drupal site with has the functionality of mulitple users/role and when we develop any feature or configure any permission for them we often switch our firefox profile or launch another browser (other than your primary browser) to see how that feature will behave for another users with different permissions.

Here is amazing CSS trick to display links and text over the image slideshow with transparent background. This is really simple to do. Just see this video from mustardseed and implement it for your websites. Really cool!

It is pain to reply to follow up comments on blogs and various site. We maintain a site ggsipu.info which has more than 10k members and people ask so many questions via comments but they have to come to the website to post the comments. Which is pain!!

Drupal has a module to save time and make it very easy for the site visitors to reply to the comments right from their mailbox.

MailComment does just that. It is a gateway module for responding to posts via email. It links outgoing notifications emails with incoming email responses using a combination of mail parameters and digital signatures.

When enabled, it adds to outgoing notifications emails a message that looks like:
((( Reply ABOVE this LINE to POST a COMMENT )))

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual, a community of users, or an enterprise to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Hundreds of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power an endless variety of web sites, including

• Community web portals
• Discussion sites
• Corporate web sites
• Intranet applications
• Personal web sites or blogs
• Aficionado sites
• E-commerce applications
• Resource directories
• Social Networking sites

If you are a company based in NCR and looking for professional consultancy in Drupal then call me at 9810949699. We at Sparxsys Solutions work on Drupal and have build some really cool websites. If you are a web development company and want to train their employees then do let us know.

Also subscribe to our blog http://www.sparxsys.com/blog where we write mostly on Drupal and other Open Source Technologies.

Sparxsys is a professional Drupal consultancy company, specializing in custom development of high quality websites. Our rapid development process allows us to build feature-rich web solutions for our clients quickly and affordably. We offer full-service web development including custom Drupal development, logo design and branding, visual design, Drupal theming, user training, and site maintenance.

We are a startup company and use Open Source heavily for all our development. This is one of the main reason that we offer affordable services.

Check out some really cool websites created by us:

Timerays: http://www.sparxsys.com/projects/timerays
Creative Infra: http://www.sparxsys.com/projects/creative-infra
WeddingAlliances: http://www.sparxsys.com/projects/wedding-alliances

I am blogging after so many days, but there is a good reason for it. We revamped our company website completely and we tried to gave it a complete different look.

Check this out.

I downloaded the latest drupal from the cvs using the command below.

When I tried to install the drupal it gave me a blank page when I clicked on "Install drupal in english". I tried everything from re-downloading the code to commeting some lines in the install.inc file but all in vain but finaly I have fixed it. I know it is kinda dirty way of fixing things. I saw this page http://drupal.org/node/298391 while searching for solution. Though I did not apply the patch. I made the change in the includes/install.inc file manually.

In the function "function drupal_detect_database_types()" Replace this portion of the code.

These days I am working on my other site www.ggsipu.info to build the database of all the colleges affiliated to GGSIPU. I created a Custom Content Type to have various fields like college address, phone, fax, email, rating, etc. During the counselling time the students wants to compare various colleges based on various parameters like infrastructure, campus and other things. Now I wanted to create a view where a table is shown with the names of the colleges in the header and these parameters on rows.

I created a view table, but obviously it showed the college names in the rows as it is the dynamic part. I searched around a lot on drupal and google and found this amazing piece of code that transpose the rows/columns.

You just need to replace YOURTHEME with the name of the theme and VIEWNAME with the view name and that's it!

Drupal is an English rendering of the Dutch word “druppel”, which means “drop” (as in “a water droplet”). The choice of “drop” was merely coincidental, Dries Buytaert the original writer wanted to register dorp.org (meaning “village” in Dutch, in reference to his program’s community aspect) Dries made a typo when checking the domain name and thought it sounded better.

Source: http://hehe2.net/apps/etymology-of-an-open-source-appproject/

Drupal Delhi meetup is a gathering of drupal enthusiasts in Delhi. This meetup is focused at getting together and coding for drupal. The event will focus on module development and theme development for drupal. There will be two talks, one focused on drupal module development and another one focused at drupal theme development. Following the talks we will have hacking session for coding a module and a theme.