Articles

Quite often we get support requests from clients who believe that 95% of their site is working fine but for a few lingering issues which their previous developers could not fix / complete. In most cases the lingering issues are more symptoms of bad builds than pending issues. In such cases we usually insist on a full Drupal review and audit of the site before we work on the issues. The client would normally be shocked to know that there were a lot of things on the site that were not done right but it would be too late for any corrections by the original developers. So how do you know if your Drupal site is built right?

Zyxware is pronounced as "Sixware" In phonetic notation this is written as zikswe(ə)r The name was coined by using three common alphabets used for naming variables in mathematics - x, y and z - and merging them with the 'ware' in software or hardware creating a new word that rhymes with both software and hardware. The letters x, y and z are also important in mathematics as the names of the three axes used to define 3 dimensional space.

Drupal is pronounced as "Druppel" with 'D' as in 'D'o, 'ru' as in T'rue', 'ppe' as in 'Pe'n and 'l' as in Tel'l'.

I had a requirement where I had to execute shell command from PHP. The requirement was that I had to find details of a domain using commands like whois and then store this information into files in a folder. The only input parameter for the process was the name of the domain which was passed on from the Drupal site. The PHP function (shell_exec) was designed to do things like this.

When you want to dynamically create content from some raw data in Drupal, you might have to create a node programmatically. This comes in handy when you want to use custom forms to collect user input and then create nodes using the the input collected. If you want to know how to programmatically create a node continue reading.

We were faced with a Sensitive Cookie Missing 'HTTPONLY' Attribute error in one of the more sophisticated Drupal applications we were developing. This error occurred when we were trying to get the Drupal application scrutinized for PCI Compliance. If you are faced with the same scenario in your Drupal then read on to find out the solution PCI is an industry standard designed to review organizations who handle sensitive credit card information to prevent Credit Card fraud and it is important to get your Drupal application scrutinized if it is to handle such information

Drupal depends on a cron system to execute period tasks in Drupal. This cron system in turn expects a call to the cron.php file from a client either as a Drupal shell request or as an http request to the Drupal site. The following outlines how to set up a cron job in an Amazon AWS server set up using the bitnami stack.

Some times we need to protect our site from public users and make it available only to selected number of users. For examply you might want to protect your alpha site from the public and from search engine bots. In such situations we protect our site with HTTP password. Follow the below steps for protecting your Drupal site with HTTP password. This was written for an Amazon AWS server but should work on most GNU/Linux servers.

Nowadays most of the websites that are being built will have a mobile version also. One of the specific aspects we have to take care of with mobile sites is writing proper code to switch a drupal site to mobile website when the site is accessed from a mobile device. If you are trying to do the same thing then please follow below steps to solve your issue. Although this is written in the context of Drupal websites this should apply for other websites as well.

When developing a website we might often come across situations where we have to limit the entry into each text fields to a certain type. One of the common scenarios we run into when developing Drupal websites is to limit text fields to accept only numbers as its input. If you want to know how to limit a text field to accept only numbers as input then read on to find out more.

In one of my recent Drupal projects I needed to add some extra classes to the body tag. Usually classes are added to the body tag in one of our template file namely html.tpl.php. The classes can be added via an implementation of hook_preprocess_html. Now let's see how it can be done.