How to Add a Facebook Share Button to Drupal Views

17 December, 2013 | Drupal Development | 6 seen

Adding a Facebook share button to your Drupal website can help improve your website's user experience. By making it easier for visitors to share your content, you can encourage more engagement and interaction with your website, which can lead to increased customer loyalty and better overall website performance.

A time ago, I created a tutorial showing how you can add a Facebook-like button to your Drupal-powered site. That tutorial was pretty easy because we used a module. Today I'm willing to show, how to add a Facebook share button to the Drupal views page.

Go to the Facebook developer center - https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/share-button/ 

Generate your share button:

We will use HTML5.

Now you must add JavaScript SDK to your theme, you can load JavaScript with the theme .info file

Once JavaScript is added to your theme - go to your views, add a new field  - path, exclude it from your display, and move it under the custom text field (custom text I use for views overrides)

Now open your custom text field and add HTML5 code from the Facebook page, change URL to [path]…

How to automatically add watermarks to uploaded images in Drupal

16 December, 2013 | Drupal Development | 64 seen

Drupal is a powerful content management system (CMS) that allows users to create and manage websites with ease. One of the features that make Drupal popular among users is its flexibility and extensibility. Drupal's module system allows users to add functionalities to their websites, including automatic watermarking of uploaded images.

If you are making photos and publicizing them to the internet - sooner or later you will find that you want to protect them somehow.

Protect yourself from people stealing your artwork and re-publishing pictures in other places. One way to protect images is to add watermarks. Well, it doesn't mean someone still won't steal your pictures, but at least your watermark will be on. 

I have found one solution in Drupal 7, using the ImageCache action module:

As you can see on picture above - I have added simple watermark on bottom right corner. And it's done with Drupal Image Cache actions module.

• Download ImageCache actions module
• Extract to sites/all/modules
• Enable Imagecache Canvas Actions

Now go to your image style settings (admin/config/media/image-…

Facebook advertising: How to promote your page and reach a wider audience

15 December, 2013 | Blogging | 3 seen

Facebook advertising is a powerful tool for promoting your Facebook page and reaching a wider audience. With more than 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook provides businesses and organizations with an unparalleled opportunity to connect with potential customers and promote their brand. In this article, we'll explore the basics of Facebook advertising and provide tips for how to use it to promote your page and reach a wider audience.

The first step in promoting your Facebook page is to define your target audience. This involves identifying the demographics, interests, and behaviors of the people you want to reach. Facebook offers a range of targeting options, including age, gender, location, interests, and more. By targeting your ads to a specific audience, you can increase the chances that your message will be seen by people who are likely to be interested in your brand.

Facebook offers a variety of ad formats, including image, video, carousel, and more. The type of ad you choose will depend on your goals and the content you want to promote. For…

Tbilisi First Snow

13 December, 2013 | Living in Georgia | 9 seen

First snow appeared today on Tbilisi streets. Made some random photography of it.

Update: I have created much better quality Tbilisi winter photos. Read more: Tbilisi - Fairyland in Winter

Snow in Tbilisi

Its snowing on Tamar Mephe street

Police patrol in Tbilisi streets

Tbilisi Railway Station

How to configure postmarkapp to work with Drupal webform

12 December, 2013 | Drupal Development | 14 seen

If you are running your site under Apache then most probably your server will be auto configured with mail send module.

But if you are running, lets say Ngnix without mail send function enabled, then you might consider some options to send e-mails from your site. And one of this options is to use Postmarkapp.com service.

Today I'll show how to configure your Drupal powered site to deliver e-mails using postmarkapp and few handy modules.

At first - go to the postmarkapp.com and sign up for a new user (if you haven't done that already)

N.B. Postmarkapp.com wont allow to use major public domain names like gmail.com, so use your custom domain name instead.

Once you have been registered, you'll see screen like this:

Click on the blue button, suggesting to Setup a New Server

Enter the name of your new server and click on Next Step

Screen with deployment actions will appear, and at the result you should see congratulations, that your new server has been created. Now you should add some sender signatures (without sender…

Most visited Georgian websites (2013)

11 December, 2013 | Living in Georgia | 127 seen

After living in Georgia for almost 2 and a half years I still haven't found any reliable website traffic analyzer, except Alexa and local top.ge statistics.

Today I'll try to put both of them in one pot, and make some analysis.

According to Alexa:

According to top.ge

Now let's take those websites, we see on both tables and put on one, just those who overlap:…

The Mentalist

10 December, 2013 | Worth to Watch | 15 seen

The Mentalist is an American drama television series that ran from September 23, 2008, until February 18, 2015, broadcasting 151 episodes over seven seasons, on CBS.

The show was created by Bruno Heller, who is also its executive producer. The show follows former "psychic" Patrick Jane (Simon Baker), who is a consultant to the California Bureau of Investigation (CBI), using the highly developed observational skills he previously employed to "read" people's minds.

The series follows Patrick Jane, an independent consultant for the California Bureau of Investigation (CBI) based in Sacramento, California. Although not an officer of the law, he uses his skills from his former career as a successful, yet admittedly fraudulent, psychic medium to help a team of CBI agents solve murders. The real reason for Jane's involvement with law enforcement is to track down the serial killer known as Red John, who was responsible for the brutal murders of his wife, Angela Ruskin Jane, and his daughter, Charlotte Anne Jane.

Found these TV-series on IMDB. Since the rating was 8.0, decided to…

Image hover effects - how to change background on mouse over

5 December, 2013 | Drupal Development | 40 seen

Today I faced again some interesting thing to create - on hover image to change the background and display text over it

Here is how it looks:

On the left side, you can see the default image, while on the right side with mouse over. To achieve such behavior in Drupal is pretty simple, a little bit CSS and you are done.

Here is my view with div tags and Drupal fields:

And here is CSS:

Easy, right? 

Drupal pathauto + transliteration

4 December, 2013 | Drupal Development | 59 seen

Are you writing in different language than English, languages like Russian, Greek, Georgian, Hebrew or maybe Latvian? You find it's not attractive URL generated? In this article you will learn how to fix this using Drupal CMS and a neat module - Transliteration.

Take a look at these screenshots:

Here is Latvian URL in Chrome:

Chrome handles special characters nicely.

The same URL in Mozilla Firefox:

First problems detected - special characters have been converted to %C%4 - not nice.

And here is IE:

Yes, IE cannot handle them either,

The good news are - the URL will be shown nice in Google search in all browsers: Take a look at this screen made on IE.

In case you are concerned taht your URL looks ugly on Google, don't - everything is fine. But if you still find it unattractive how your language is outputted in Drupal install Drupal Transliteration module.

• Download Transliteration module
• Extract to sites/all/modules
• Enable

After you have enabled transliteration module…

Building a Drupal site from scratch - Complete series

3 December, 2013 | Drupal Development | 10 seen

<p>Some time has passed away, since I started my tutorial how to build a Drupal site from scratch. I'm making this post to list all series</p><ul><li><a href="http://www.reinisfischer.com/building-drupal-site-scratch-part-1-planin… a Drupal site from scratch - part 1 - planing</a>&nbsp;</li><li><a href="http://www.reinisfischer.com/building-drupal-site-scratch-part-2-applyi… a Drupal site from scratch - part 2 - Applying a subtheme</a>&nbsp;</li><li><a href="http://www.reinisfischer.com/building-drupal-site-scratch-part-3-better… a Drupal site from scratch - part 3 - Better administration</a>&nbsp;</li><li><a href="http://www.reinisfischer.com/building-drupal-site-scratch-part-4-creati… a Drupal site from scratch - part 4 - Creating views</a>&nbsp;</li><li><a href="http://www.reinisfischer.com/building-drupal-site-scratch-part-5-custom… a Drupal site from scratch - part 5 - Custom fronpage</a>&nbsp;</li><li><a href="http://www.reinisfischer.com/building-drupal-site-scratch-part-6-workin… a…

Blog statistics November 2013

1 December, 2013 | Blogging | 6 seen

Second month, since I started this blog has passed away. As started on November, I'm sharing results of my blog statistics in month of November.

Top 10 posts according to Google Analytics:

• Estonia to catch up Scandinavia in next 10-15 years 
• Armenia, then, now - future 
• CIS, Baltics and Georgia GDP 2018 
• Ukraine vs Poland by GDP 1990-2012 
• Views lode more pager with Ajax for Drupal 
• Will Ukraine sign Association agreement? Doubt that! 
• Baltic's vs Caucasus by GDP 2012 
• Blog statistics October 2013 
• Drupal 7 override page.tpl.php for specific content type 
• Drupal views archive page 

Drupal: Sending Confirmation Emails from Your Webform

30 November, 2013 | Drupal Development | 24 seen

Today, I encountered a problem that at first seemed like a pain, but in the end, turned out to be simpler than I thought. I needed to send a confirmation email to the submitter of a webform, letting them know that their email had been received, along with some plain text instructions.

A while back, I wrote about how to add a contact form to Drupal, and today I want to share with you how to send a confirmation email to the submitter.

This is the screenshot for webform I have on my site. As you can see, I have a field called - Your email. Now if we go to E-mails tab, we can add some componet to send confirmation mesagge to value of email field:

Click next to Component value, and choose from dropdown your email field. Next click Add.

Now change E-mail to address value, to Component yiur e-mail field. Add some customization and message. And you are done. Save your form. And next time, someone will leave a message to your webform. He/she will recieve confimation e-mail as well. Simple, right?

The Eastern Partnership Summit and Ukraine's Decision to Not Sign the Association Agreement with the EU (2013)

29 November, 2013 | Emerging Markets | 10 seen

As I previously wrote, Ukraine has made the controversial decision to not sign the association agreement with the European Union (EU) at the Eastern Partnership summit in Vilnius.

The issue of signing the agreement had been a topic of much speculation and intrigue, with Ukrainian representatives giving mixed signals about their stance on European integration.

The Eastern Partnership is a project that aims to bring the EU and its six Eastern neighbors, including Ukraine, closer together. The summit was held in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, and was attended by leaders from the EU and the Eastern Partnership countries.

Despite the Ukrainian government's initial stance on the matter, many were hopeful that the association agreement would be signed on November 29th. However, the signing did not come to fruition. This decision not to sign the agreement has been met with disappointment and concern from both the EU and Ukraine's citizens.

The association agreement was seen as a crucial step towards closer ties between Ukraine and the EU, and its rejection marks a setback for the Eastern Partnership project as a whole. The agreement would have…

Simplifying Drupal View Editing with Contextual Links

28 November, 2013 | Drupal Development | 7 seen

I have been working with Drupal since its 6th release, and one of the reasons I love it is due to Views. In all the websites I've built using Drupal, Views make up 80% of the site structure. I am familiar with what each View does and where to find it.

However, I have always been puzzled by the presence of direct edit links for both Views and blocks in the theme region. At first, I thought it was related to the version of Views, but later on, I realized that this was not the case. Despite my knowledge of the Views I had built, I did not pay much attention to this as I did not need the edit link in the theme.

Today, I encountered a project where Views were built by someone else and the number of Views was over 300. This confusion led me to the solution.

If you are in the same boat as I was, you'll be amused to know that it is a feature provided by the Drupal core module - Contextual Links. It is so simple - just turn it on and both your Views and blocks will have the added convenience of an edit link.

Europe, What's Next? - A Journey to Estonia (2014)

27 November, 2013 | Documentaries | 1 seen

I had the pleasure of watching a captivating documentary by Deutsche Welle about Estonia, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the Baltic states.

The film takes us on a journey through Estonia, exploring its diverse landscape and meeting the people who call it home. From the former fisherwoman who has turned her passion into a thriving business to the power station employee who remains wary of the integration of the Russian population, this film offers a fascinating glimpse into the lives of the Estonian people.

Watch on Youtube