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Mike's Blog

That's right - the Ixis team will be descending on Copenhagen for a week of all things Drupal. The twice a year international conference for all things Drupal is being held in Copenhagen between 23rd and 27th of August.

We'll be in Copenhagen from the 20th August until the 27th and would love to meet anybody who we've worked with or spoken to over our six years of Drupal goodness - so please track us down or send a message to arrange a meet-up.

Good news for us all at the Ixis office this week with the results of a 13 year-long study on drinking hot beverages.

Scientists in the Netherlands have been tracking 40,000 people who enjoy a fair few coffees and teas during the day, and the results are handy to know.

"Those who drank more than six cups of tea a day cut their risk of heart disease by a third" ... Consuming between two to four coffees a day was also linked to a reduced risk.

So our healthiest team member is hosting expert Chris, who can drink huge mugs of tea constantly all day. However, we're probably ruining the health benefits with the beer tasting we do on a Friday!

If you have Twitter account for business but lack the time to try and find all your clients on there, here's a simple process that works well to give your account a kick.

Most of us should have a contact list in our mail or CRM (customer relationship manager) software that can export all client contacts to a file, or a newsletter subscriber list in which you can export the email addresses.

Twitter has a number of ways to find people and connect. The useful feature we'll use allows you to check your contacts on Gmail, Yahoo, or AOL email services using the Find Friends tool. But you're not using any of these web based email services? Doesn't matter.

A recent request from a client was to improve the Views 2 exposed taxonomy filter so that it intelligently hides taxonomy terms which aren't related to any of the content returned by the View query. As anybody who has spent time poking about in Views vast configuration panel will know, this isn't possible through the existing Taxonomy handler.

Stackoverflow.com had a few posts from users requesting the same functionality, and replies from others saying it wasn't possible with Views 2. Well the good news is: it is possible, right now, without hacking Views.

2010
Mar
19th

The Manchester Haçienda Club

Ixis worked with Manchester based agency Worship Digital to produce a great multi-media based community site for the legendary Haçienda club brand in Manchester (UK).

The project included the usual News section for promoting upcoming activities and history of the nightclub, and alongside this an events area which allowed pinning an event on the world map using a custom Drupal CCK field.

2010
Mar
14th

Generating a Twitpic.com Gallery

Whilst doing some R&D around Twitter related services I've noticed holes lacking in APIs for a number of services. It's not just myself that groans, support queues, mailing lists and Twitter are full of people grumbling about lacking functionality from the services.

Today it was the turn of photo hosting service Twitpic who provide a great basic API service but lacks any ability to extract all images for a specific user through the API. A minor bonus is that each user of the service gets an RSS feed of their uploaded images, although it only serves the last 20 images - 20 being the number of photos shown per page.

2010
Feb
25th

Styling Webform Blocks

Posted in

We've had a lot of emails about our simple but effective webform block module over the past year. It's great to know it has filled a gap for a lot of Drupal users out there.

One of the common questions we keep getting is about how we styled up the webform to look like our Ixis contact form in the footer of all our site pages.

The answer is simple: adding container tags around sets of the form fields is all you need! This is achieved by adding some additional form API attributes called #prefix (before the content) and #suffix (after the content).

2010
Jan
26th

New Year, New Staff

We kicked off the new year with expansion in our web development team to meet the never ending increase in Drupal demand.

During the last 12 months we were turning down work because the team was fully booked every month with client projects, and 2010 has already brought a wave of new clients for both the development and hosting services, so the team expansion could not come at a better time.

The content management platform Drupal powers 100% of Ixis' projects, and has seen a huge increase in adoption from small to International organisations across the world. This growing buzz has lead to a staggering increase in Drupal specific work leads on a daily basis for us here at Ixis IT.

To strengthen the support capabilities with our clients, Ixis have partnered with Acquia to provide an additional level of support for our clients.

In addition to support we also get access to the additional marketing, branding, and services with Acquia provides. We look forward to a growing partnership as we attract larger Drupal development projects in the years to come.

Acquia Partners include some of the most talented contributors to the Drupal community and have completed successful Drupal projects worldwide for clients large and small. We at Ixis are proud to be amongst the members of the Acquia scheme.

2009
Sep
25th

We want PHP/Drupal Developers

After another successful year in the land of Drupal we're pleased to be expanding the development team here at Ixis. We're on the look out for two developers to join us on-site in our Daresbury office in the UK. Your work will be based at our new office and travel to clients is not required.

We work in a relaxed and informal environment, where the ability to manage your time and work load independently is important. You'll often be involved in several projects at the same time, although you may be responsible for a website from start to finish depending on work load.

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