September 1st, 2010
I've been working on a project that required some pretty heavy-duty customizations to how the user registration form looks and while getting everything to work I learned a few things that have changed the way I look at customizing forms in Drupal. Here is a quick summary of what I already new, and what I know now.
May 12th, 2010
It has been a bit of an adventure getting the SSO module to work with a site that already utilizes the Domain Access module. I got this all working yesterday... hopefully this clarifies things for people. I got a lot of help by reading the UPGRADE.txt that comes with SSO and by reading this issue: http://drupal.org/issues/595802
These steps assume you already have a site setup using Domain Access and you have a couple of domains/sub domains going.
March 4th, 2010
Drush (Drupal + Shell) is a set of scripts that lets you control your Drupal site directly from the command line. Without every touching your mouse you can clear the cache, do an SQL Dump ,and even download and enable modules directly from drupal.org.
Since inserting Drush into my workflow I've saved hours of downloading modules and adding them into my svn repositories (drush dl); grabbing top-level information about my sites (drush st); and even running some quick code snippits (drush eval).
Sooo good.
August 16th, 2009
PathAuto is an elegantly simple module. It lets you create automated alias rules so that your URLs remain relevant and seo friendly based on node types. For example, on this site I have pathauto setup to create a /blog/title-of-post. More correctly I have pathauto setup to create /blog/title_post by using its built in mechanism for omitting certain words from the automated URL alias.
July 19th, 2009
It's simple: Drupal + SVN = happy web developer.
This is the story of how I generally structure my Drupal based sites using Subversion (SVN) to make development, versioning and deployment easy and well-organized. A quick note: this post assumes that you already know the nitty gritty of how to use SVN and the basic setup and structure of a Drupal-based site.
June 4th, 2009
When I first installed the backup & migrate module I was just looking for a quick and easy way to backup the database of one of my Drupal-based sites and it served that purpose well (even letting me schedule backups), but I didnt realize how useful it would be to my development process. Here's what I mean… My usual development process usually goes something like this:
May 16th, 2009
You know that rule about the simplest solutions being the best solutions? Well here you have a module that takes all of your admin tools and places them in a simple dropmenu at the top of every page on your site (for admins only, of course). This module is as simple as they come - no configuration necessary (there are a couple of options if you can't live without fiddling) - but it can save you tons of time when your trying to do some serious site maintainence.
May 12th, 2009
(This is one of those lists that I plan to keep updating so check back)
Drupal has a little over 3 gazillion modules available these days and while most them are only appropriate for a limited number of sites there are a select few that I must have. If you've ever used Drupal then the fact that many (most? all?) of these modules made my list should not be a big suprise. But just in case I'm going go spend some time getting under the hood of each module (listed in no particular order) that I install without thinking every time I start a new Drupal-based site: