drupal

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.

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…

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:

• An Image - A background image (a CSS Sprite) which contains the days, months and years.
• Some HTML - A VERY basic HTML template.
• Some CSS - To align the image sections.
• A PHP Snippet - A Drupal preprocess function.

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.

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 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…

A while ago we started having issues running a website. Bandwidth. Upon investigation, we saw that the majority of bandwidth was being use by image files and of those, lot was from the ImageCache folder. It was also causing a lot of excess server load by consuming Apache processes. Something needed to be done.

I recently stumbled across a handy tutorial on configuring a Drupal dictionary in Vim for autocomplete. I also remembered helping a friend out with a similar problem, Drupal syntax highlighting for Nano. I then combined the two and have a simple to follow tutorial for generating your own drupal 6 dictionary for vim autocomplete!

I just updated this server to PHP 5.3. As all my sites are Drupal 6 it seems I have a few issues ahead which mean I need to patch Drupal to stop PHP complaining about deprecated stuff…

So I headed over to the post on drupal.org which is discussing 5.3 compatibility in Drupal 6 (which I personally think SHOULD go in) to grab a patch. I applied the patch with no problems. I refreshed a page and got a white screen so I checked the logs only to see…

I like little wins. I was just looking through the CSS file for this site and noticed that - for some reason - I'd used 0px instead of   a LOT of times. Most values need numbers (10em, 10px, 10% and 10pt are all very difference sizes) however 0 is one of the few valeus which is the same in all cases (0px, 0pt, 0% and 0 are all zero!). This adds up to wasted data and bandwidth; admitedly not a lot, but still Every Little Helps!

So I fired up Vim. Initially, I just did:

I just hit an interesting issue while trying to upgrade a Drupal 5.18 site to Drupal 6.12. I went to the update.php page and noticed an error at the top implying the url_aliastable was having issues due to Drupal 6 expecting a language column which wasn't present in Drupal 5. "No problem" I thought, "That'll get fixed during the update!". This was the beginning of a long learning curve through the new <a href="http://api.drupal.org/api/group/batch/6">Batch API</a> system!

Back in November last year, I wrote a script which handled backing up a drupal database. There were quite a few comments and I've taken some on board and developed the script on a little further to be more "generic".

One of the main complaints/suggestions about my previous snippet was the hard coded nature of it. The follow script offers far more configuration through the command line itself.