Articles

Zyxware default image2
| 2 min read
The default behavior of drupal_redirect_form in Drupal 6 is to redirect the user to $_GET['q'] when an explicit redirect location is not set in $form_state['redirect']. So any form submission from a Drupal page with additional querystrings like in a paginated form (for example admin content listing forms or admin comment listing forms) will result in the querystrings being lost. This can be frustrating when you administer content from such forms as you have to click the pager link and go back to the previous page after form submission. This can easily be fixed by adding a submit handler for the form in question and setting form_state redirect correctly.
Zyxware default image3
| 3 min read
The default comment moderation system in Drupal 6 is crude at best primarily because of the limitation of the admin comment listings. The information that is shown by default are 'Subject', 'Author', 'Posted in', 'Time' and 'Operations'. Now the main objective of comment moderation is to reject spam comments. None of these fields give any information about whether the comment is a spam comment or not and you will have to view each comment by going to the edit view of the comment and then approve or reject the comment. This is a very laborious and frustrating process. You have three options to solve this problem and get a better comment administration interface - one is to create a comment view, another is to alter the default comment administration form and the third is of course a custom solution for comment administration.
Zyxware default image3
| 3 min read
APC or Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a free and open opcode cache for PHP. APC allows for caching of opcode generated during PHP script parsing and execution by the Zend engine. If you are using APC 3.1.9 and you are using the default configuration you might run into the error where most PHP requests will return a warning message "PHP Warning: Unknown: Unable to allocate memory for pool. in Unknown on line 0"
Zyxware default image2
| 2 min read
This is how you would normally render a view display passing filter inputs via code: $view = views_get_view('view-name'); $view->set_display('display-name'); $view->is_cacheable = FALSE; $filter_1 = $view->get_item('display-name', 'filter', 'filter_1_id'); $filter_2 = $view->get_item('display-name', 'filter', 'filter_2_id'); $filter_1['value'] = "value1"; $filter_2['value'] = "value2"; $view->set_item('display-name', 'filter', 'filter_1_id', $filter_1); $view->set_item('display-name', 'filter', 'filter_2_id', $filter_2); dpm($view->render());
Zyxware default image4
| 3 min read
One of the Drupal sites we maintain had recently started slowing down considerably in spite of the site mostly being static and in spite of boost set up on the server. On examination of the site we found that two things were happening on the site. One was that the site was being crawled indiscriminately by rogue crawlers. This we solved using the DDOS deflate script and setting DDOS deflate to run every 10 seconds. The second problem was that there were some bots which were continuously sending POST requests to /comment/cid/reply pages. For this we had to come up with a workaround.
Zyxware default image4
| 2 min read
In Drupal every path in the site goes via index.php and goes through some Drupal menu. However to make the Drupal application behave live a typical static website in terms of URL architecture sometimes clients request for adding slashes to the end of virtual direcotry paths. At the same time slashes would not look good at the end of virtual file paths. There is an easy way to do this using apache htaccess rules
Zyxware default image2
| 3 min read
Blocks are regions on a Drupal website that show small but significant pieces of content. Blocks are an important component from the perspective of a Drupal website. Blocks are usually assigned to regions in a page and they are supposed to be printed on a page. However there are many instances where you might want to print a block within a content. It is not directly possible to assign a block to a region within content (node in Drupal speak) as you can do with a page. But as with everything in Drupal there is a way to do that.
Zyxware default image2
| 4 min read
Sometimes we get requests to update Drupal sites and get it done in less than 5 hours. If we take the Drupal update through the full fail-safe set of steps for Drupal updates we will never be able to complete updates in less than 5 hours on a site we don't maintain. For such sites when the cost of the site going down may not be too high for the site owner it might not be too big an issue if the update is run on a hit or miss approach. We normally do not recommend such an approach but this should work on most small sites without any issues.
Zyxware default image2
| 3 min read
Keeping the Drupal core and contributed modules up-to-date (at least on the security updates) is one of the essential steps for keeping a Drupal site safe and secure. Running updates of Drupal modules is usually a straightforward mechanism on a Drupal site that is done right. However what will you do if you do not know how things have been built? What will you do if some of the custom modules used are tied down to specific versions of some contributed module? What if there were custom changes on the site. Here is how you can run updates on a Drupal site almost completely safely.
Web accessibility checkpoints in Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
| 3 min read
When you want to move a Drupal site from one hosting server to another you have to ensure that the site works the same way on the new server as it used to work on the old server. There is no real fool proof way of doing this other than to meticulously document all the custom aspects associated with setting up the site and verifying it on the new server. The following is a checklist of information you have to collect before you move your Drupal site from one server to another. Checklist: Migrate from one server to another
Zyxware default image3
| 2 min read
”rsync” is an open source utility in Linux/Unix primarily used for synchronising files/directories over the networks. You can also use it to backup/copy folders between machines. It is particularly made use of to while administering servers connected to the internet. The term “rsync” itself refers to “remote-synchronise”.
Zyxware default image3
| 3 min read
If you own a VPS or a dedicated server or a hosting server which allows you to have shell access then you can easily set up your own git server with as many users and as many repositories as can be stored in the space on your server. All you need to do this is a bit of system administration skills and a hosting server that allows you shell access. Read on to see how you can set up your own git server.
Zyxware default image3
| 3 min read
If you run a reasonably popular site there is a very good chance that you will get crawled by unscrupulous crawlers once in a while. The regular search crawlers from the popular search engines like the Google bot, Yahoo bot, Bing bot themselves are pretty intensive when they crawl sites but they do have limits on the number of pages crawled per visit and the number of simultaneous connections opened to your server. However there are lots of unscrupulous crawlers like spam bots, email harvesting bots and even some search engines who do not set any reasonable limits on the number of simultaneous connections to your server. There are hardware solutions that are available to prevent this but they may not be affordable for everybody. There is however a simple netstat based solution to prevent DDOS.
Zyxware default image3
| 3 min read
On a WHM/cpanel VPS server the httpd.conf is automatically generated from cpanel scripts based on templates and you are not supposed to change this file directly. Any changes that you make in the httpd.conf file will be lost when cpanel re-generates the file or when cpanel is updated. This is an inconvenience especially when your application requires you to make virtualhost modifications in the configuration. However cpanel provides an alternative way to edit the httpd.conf file.
Zyxware default image1
| 2 min read
When you untar large tar files even as the root user on your VPS you might run into the error "Cannot change ownership to uid NNN, gid NNN: Disk quota exceeded". This is because the extracted files from the tar archive is being attempted to be created with the original UID and GID as on the system where the tar archive was created. Now if the UID is not already present on the new VPS or if the UID corresponds to a user without a lot of disc quota available the above error will be triggered preventing extraction of the tar.gz archive.
Zyxware default image3
| 2 min read
Most of us must be familiar with the names 'dig' and 'whois'. If not, these are two commands used to find the details of domains. You just have to type in dig domainname or whois domainname to get a comprehensive set of info on the domain. What if you have not just one or two domains to check about. How about a 1000 domains and you want to know the details of each?
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