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Know Your PHP Environments
5 Dec, 2009
I use Marc Liyanage’s PHP5 distribution on my Mac instead of the version that comes installed with OS X; sooner or later I usually find that there’s some extension that’s either missing or too old for a particular development requirement, and Marc’s distribution is usually a little more up to date and complete.
Module Weight and Overriding Menu Items in Drupal 5
27 Aug, 2009
Module weights sometimes come into play when you’re trying to override certain aspects of the core or other modules. If you look in the Drupal database’s system table you’ll notice a field called weight - this is what determines the order in which all of the installed modules’ hooks will get called during a page request.
Migrating content from MovableType or TypePad to Drupal with Python
25 Jul, 2009
Migrating content out of one blogging or content management system into another is one of those tasks that doesn’t usually merit writing a feature-complete, polished migration tool; no two systems are alike, and no two migration scenarios are alike either. Since it’s an infrequent process, there’s not really incentive for anyone to write or maintain a dedicated Drupal module for doing such migrations (unless perhaps they find themselves doing a whole lot of migrations for clients.)
The Devel Module Observation Effect
8 Jun, 2009
The Devel module is such an indispensable part of any Drupal developer’s toolkit that it’s easy to forget that it does sometimes tinker with Drupal at a fairly low level. I was getting a perplexing error from an XML-RPC service I was developing as part of a Drupal module.
DrupalCon DC: FileMaker/Drupal BoF Session Thursday at 11:30, Room 156
4 Mar, 2009
Greetings from DrupalCon DC 2009! It’s been a great first day - lots of informative sessions, and a lot of fun to reconnect with so many people with whom I’ve crossed paths since getting into Drupal.
Drupal: Beware of Duplicate Modules
16 Feb, 2009
File this under “It goes without saying,” but this one had me so puzzled for a time that I thought it bore repeating.
In general, a good best practice for any Drupal site is to put all third-party modules under your sites/all/modules directory; this makes for good portability when it comes time to upgrade the Drupal core, and makes it generally easier to keep track of what you’ve installed.
Drupal: Finding Uncategorized Nodes
30 Jan, 2009
If you’re working with a site with a lot of nodes, especially nodes that have been migrated out of another CMS or blogging tool, you’ll probably find yourself wondering which nodes are floating around without any taxonomy terms, so that you can go back and make sure they’re duly categorized.
Getting a raw list of node ID’s and titles is simple with the following SQL query, which you can execute from the MySQL command line client, or PHPMyAdmin (which your web host’s admin panel probably provides):
Bones Module: Development Release for Drupal 6
1 Jan, 2009
The initial release of the Bones Module for Drupal 6 is now available at http://drupal.org/project/bones. Functionally it is more or less identical to the original Drupal 5 release, with updates to the internal Menu API code.
The Bones Module facilitates rapid site wireframing by importing YAML outlnes.
Building out Drupal module interfaces with a stub function
22 Dec, 2008
A technique that I’m finding quite useful during module development is to create a “stub” function for use as a generic interface callback for menu items that I want to define, but haven’t yet written callbacks for. For example, if I were building a Drupal 5 module called widgetmaster, I would define:
Searching the Drupal Database by Regular Expression
18 Dec, 2008
I found myself wanting to use regular expressions to find some imported Drupal nodes containing broken old image paths. Naturally, I went looking for a module that might accommodate me and I did find the Scanner module. Unfortunately the site I was working with is in Drupal 6, and I didn’t have the time to work on a Drupal 6 port of what looks like a pretty sophisticated module just to find a few nodes.
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