Drupal tips

Command line Drupal install and update script for multi-site hosting

Maintaining a Drupal site, or a collection of sites is much easier if everything is kept completely separate--Drupal core, contributed modules, and the site itself.
This is even more important if multiple sites are hosted on the same server. Drupal's own multi-site support can be a nightmare to maintain, believe me! (e.g. when you want to upgrade modules or core).
A must simpler and easily supported configuration is to keep everything separate and to use symbolic links to tie it all together. For example, I keep:

Technical Notes

These notes are my personal online notebook of useful commands and "how-to's". You are welcome to make use of them if you find them helpful. They obviously don't come with any warranty! Click on one of the category tags above for the notes in any category.

Drupal 6 to 7 upgrades

The "Support" module on Drupal

[writeup] **Warning: Tag still open at end of document:  "pre"
\

Some notes on configuring the module

  • Follow the online instructions, but also
    • set the support content type not to be on the front page
    • set the from email address to be do-not-reply@mydomain
    • Default sort: State/ascending
    • Secondary sort: Last update/descending
    • Modify the new and updated ticket email to be something like this:
Please do not reply to this message but update the ticket with any responses.
!update_username has created the ticket '!ticket_subject':
!ticket_url
Ticket text:
------------------------------
!ticket_body------------------------------

Deleting large numbers of comments from Drupal

  • You can easily delete all comments with:
DELETE FROM comments;
  • The problem comes when there are good and bad comments, and you only want to get the bad comments. -The cleanest way is to delete all the rogue users first. That will set the UID on their comments to 0, so you can delete all their comments by running:
DELETE FROM comments WHERE uid=0;

Resources for creating a new drupal module

This is my quick reference of useful links
Module developer's guide: http://drupal.org/developing/modules
Coding standards: http://drupal.org/coding-standards
Doxygen and comment formatting conventions: http://drupal.org/node/1354
Apply for contributions CVS access: http://drupal.org/cvs-application/requirements
and then: http://drupal.org/cvs-application

Themeing CCK output in Drupal

There seem to be several ways of getting CCK fields into your node-typename-node.tpl.php file:

  • First using the _rendered variable which will give both the label and the content: <?php print $field_website_rendered; ?>
  • Second using 'view' which will just give the contents of the field:<?php print $field_website[0]['view']; ?>
  • Two methods recommended by Front End Drupal. First using 'safe': <?php print $node->field_website[0]['safe']; ?> seems to fail all the time

Class 'XMLWriter' not found

In a Red Hat or CentOS server installation, XMLwriter may not be enabled by default. To enable it, follow these steps:

# If you are using the base 5.1.6 php, then
yum -y install php-xml

#if you are using php 5.2 (from the centos 5 testing repo)
yum -y --enablerepo=c5-testing install php-xml

#restart apache
service httpd restart

Drupal and PHP 5.3

There are some problems with running Drupal on php 5.3. There are five kinds of solutions:

  1. Downgrade to php 5.2.6 (not possible in many situations)
  2. modify Drupal to change the error level reporting
  3. find the latest patches to fix the problems
  4. hack Drupal core or contrib yourself to fix the errors (Drupal 6 is already compliant, but not D5)
  5. put a timezone in your php.ini to get rid of timezone errors

Drupal 6

2. Modify Drupal's error reporting --already done for Drupal 6

3. Find patches

Website Releases via Subversion (SVN)

This article was originally posted at:
http://labs.redbd.net/blog/index.cfm/2006/7/5/Website-Releases-via-Subversion-SVN
but this site now seems to be dead, so I have recovered it from archive.org and re-posted it.

If I am breaking any copyrights here, please let me know and I will remove it.

Note that Drupal now blocks any path containing "svn-base". See: http://drupal.org/node/28776


Posted At : July 5, 2006 9:54 PM By : Mark

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