New Relic is a great bit of kit - nobody can deny that. I recently needed to configure it on a standalone box so it could be open on a large screen so my colleagues and I could see the current status of our sites. New Relic has a Kiosk Mode which strips out some of the navigation from the page an optimises it for "viewing only". Very handy.
Have you ever needed or wanted to pull a remote Git Repository on Drupal.org down as a zip or tarball? You know, the way Github does? Most project releases have fairly recently built tarballs which is awesome - but Sandboxes do not (so it seems - please correct me if I'm wrong!).
The following snippet lets you "archive" a remote repository, pull it down as a tarball, and extract it in-place:
git archive --format=tar --prefix=PROJECT/ --remote=USERNAME@git.drupal.org:sandbox/USERNAME/123456789.git BRACH | tar -xf -
According to the Drupal Coding Standards for Documenting Hook Implementations, its considered a good practice to quickly chuck a comment before any function which implements a Drupal hook (eg, hook_menu). This helps someone reading your code quickly see that the function is actually linked with a hook in Drupal and isn't just a function in your module to be called directly.
Christian Bach has made an awesome JQuery plugin to turn any HTML Table into a real-time sortable table using Jquery. I recently needed to turn this into a Bookmarklet so that I could embed it onto a page to sort a large table (I did not have access to the server-side code for this table).
Ever needed to build a list which "sub-selects", say, 5 items from a given list of categories? This snippet should help.
Assume the following schema…
Nathan Rambeck has a great simple snippet of how to export a single row from a table however it didn't QUITE do what I needed it to. I needed to export a variable from {variable} as I was working on an update script which pulled data from a variable and into a database schema. I got fed up of re-populating the variable data each time.
This handy script will allow you to get the current Load Average (loadavg) for a remote server over SSH. It will stream the result set back to you, which you can then pipe into a file if you need to.
This would be handy for monitoring the load of a server while stress testing, for example.
I've had several people ask me recently how I managed to get the nice date effect on my blog headers. It's quite simple really. All you need is:
Isn't it a pain when you have dozens of Views setup and they are all marked as "overridden" because you just pulled in an updated feature file from somewhere. Features doesn't always notice when the Views on your site aren't up to date.
The following snippet (which you should use with caution) will batch "delete" (or Revert, once the view is in code) all Views which are marked as Overridden. This took a few seconds to run on our development machine.
Ever needed to Entity Encode a block of text (maybe to partially protect it from spam bots or just hide/obfuscate the content?). I did. It's pretty easy.
If it's just based Entity Encoding, you can always use htmlentities - however this only does the "important" characters such as quotes, ampersands and angle brackets.
So, Drupal 7 is out. Have you heard? It was a bit of a quiet launch really. ;-)
When it came to upgrading by blog, I decided (eventually) that I needed to do a cleanup as the Database had been upgraded from 4.7, to 5 and then to 6 - with many modules added and removed in between. New year, new drupal, new blog (kinda)!
It's also a good excuse to test out that some of the modules I maintain actually work in Drupal 7 (such as Page Title and GlobalRedirect). It's also a kick up the arse to get Relevant Content ported to Drupal 7!
Ever wondered if your Christmas Tree is really any good? Well last weekend I decided to make a website for this purpose. It's just a bit of fun really! You login using your Facebook credentials (using Facebook Connect) and can create Chrismas Tree posts by linking to Flickr or Facebook photo's. You can then vote on your favourite tree's in an "A vs B" type match. If you like the sound of this and fancy something a bit festive, please give it a go and let me know if you have any thoughts! Head over to Rate My Christmas Tree :-)
Sometimes, when you're running coder on a module, you'll get a lot of errors complaining about Windows line endings. This is because you should set your editor to use Unix Line endings to be consistent with all developers. See the Drupal Coding Standards for more details.
Below is a handy bash script which will help you batch convert many files from DOS to Unix line endings.
Did anyone else get a Drupal EyeGrow (or Druplipets as they seem to be known) from DrupalCon CPH?
I started growing mine around a week ago and, as you can see, it's coming on pretty well!
How do you find "all" the Drupal sites that Google knows about?
A post on drupal.org suggests Add New Comment, but that wont be entirely accurate. So far I have come up with a search that lists all sites with a User Account page on user/login:
intitle:"User account" inurl:"user/login"
I just wanted to quickly setup a reminder on my mac (in this case that Star Trek was on in ten minutes - I know, I'm a geek!). It dawned on me that I didn't know a way to do this off the top of my head.
After a little Googling and trial and error, I found that the awesome Quicksilver could execute timed events!
It's a little convoluted, however here is the process...
I use a cron script on this server which fires up Drush to run Cron (rather than the standard wget method). There is nothing wrong with using wget, however it does tie up an apache or lighttpd process while cron is running. It also means it's harder to control process priority. Drush, on the other hand, runs in CLI mode, so controlling process priority is easier (using nice). But then I started seeing odd errors…
Following Kevin Hankens post on why you shouldn't ignore Drupal 404 errors, I decided to go through yesterdays error_log on our live apache server (the one which hosts www.pponline.co.uk, www.sportbusiness.com and www.mychild.co.uk alongside around 40 other dupral sites).
Today I needed to quickly find out a list of node's which did not contain a certain token (one we use on PPOnline to insert adverts into articles). There were meant to be 2 of these tokens per article but we had noticed some only had one. Some didn't have any at all!
Now, this might already exist as a neat function somewhere, but I couldn't find it. So I wrote this little query to find the number of occurrences of a substring in a larger block of text.
I did look into using the SUBSTRING() and SUBSTRING_INDEX() commands, however I couldn't see a way of efficiently using them to find any number of occurrences. So I settled on the following…
