By default, Drupal serves all its files publicly via http. This means that any unauthorized user can directly access all the files through a browser by entering its path. This is also true for files which have permissions for them. The solution provided by Drupal, which is to make the entire file system private is resource intensive and can bring down the server. However there is another less costly workaround to this issue. Read on to find out more.
How to mix public and private folders in a Drupal installation | Creating a private folder in Drupal
What do you do when you want to delete multiple nodes from a drupal site? You go to admin » content and then delete nodes one by one? No. You go to PhpMyadmin and delete the nodes from the node table?. Absolutely not (don't even think about it). There are a few solutions. There is the Views Bulk Operations module. But there is an easy hack to do this or for that matter bulk node operations.
If you have ever hosted a reasonably good site on a shared hosting service then you would definitely have come across the dreaded "exceeded the email limit per hour" warning. If you use Drupal then you don't have to worry about this any more. If you are using Drupal then all you have to do is to install the MailQ module to queue all your mails.
The Views module in Drupal provides a Feed display that will allow for site owners to publish the content on their sites as RSS feeds. However, unlike a page or block display, the feed display does not allow for addition of custom tags inside the feed using the Views administration UI. There is however a way to add custom tags, attributes and values into the generated feed using hook_nodeapi.
If you use drupal as a blogging platform you would want to auto tweet your new posts on to twitter. Twitter and Shorten module provides you with the basic framework required to do this and all you will need to get it working is to configure these modules. There is also a small patch that has to be applied to the twitter module (until the patch goes into the CVS) to allow the use of shortened URLs in the tweet.
Drupal allows very fine grained control over how content is presented to the end user. The presentation layer is abstracted beautifully and cleanly designed hooks allows for moving data from the logic layer to the presentation layer. The template file that handles the basic page layout of every drupal site is page.tpl.php and the different regions available for a given theme are all available as HTML elements in page.tpl.php. Another important template file is node.tpl.php which decides how nodes are presented to the end user. Normally the content of nodes go into regions inside page.tpl.php and so does blocks and panels. But what if you want to have regions inside the display area of nodes? What if you want to use blocks to display content inside nodes? The answer is simple - template preprocess is the key.
Views is one of the most complex of all Drupal modules and one of the most useful of all Drupal modules. The only downside is that, since it is very complex, not too many people have been able to contribute to the documentation of the module. If you search Google for finding out how to programmatically set a filter in Views2 you probably wouldn't find any help. Here is how you do it.
Feed API provides a powerful means of importing feeds from other sites directly into your Drupal site. What if you want to export your feed as an XML file to a content distributor who wants it on his FTP site? There is of course the traditional approach of using curl to read your feed URL and dump the text as files on to the ftp site. There is not much control that you have over this process. However doing this via Drupal Views will give you fine grained control over the process
SEO requires you to have descriptive titles and URLs matching the title. But when you want to publish your URL some place where the length of the URL is an issue you definitely want short URLs. One solution to the problem is to use URL shortening services like tr.im to shorten the long URLs to short and sweet 9 character urls. But the URL will lose your sites identity. Don't worry there is the drupal way to solve this problem.
If you create anything other than a very small site using Drupal you will end up using Views and CCK, two of the most important contributed modules in Drupal. Views allow users to dynamically create different presentation of tabular data from the database. However this also necessitates dynamic page titles for pages using views.
