Technical Blog

We know Drupal 8 is the latest version of Drupal. It has lot's of difference from the previous version of Drupal. One of the major difference in Drupal 8 is in Configuration Management. In Drupal 7 there is version control system is used and for that there is different running site environments like staging, live etc are there. In Drupal 8 also have this environments but Drupal 8 comes with a file system-based configuration management system.

Today, people are looking for free and easy to use content management systems to run their website. Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS) which help users create, structure, and publish content. From a company perspective the priority will be on saving costs and shifting attention back to customers. Here is a useful checklist for developers, to meet the above needs for building a small business website without compromising the quality.

CiviCRM is an open source tool which provides a web-based interface for Constituent Relationship Management. The main advantage is that it could be coupled with the Drupal environment (or any other CMS) and used as a Relationship management tool. Using the functionalities we can handle the relationships with the people, households, organizations etc. It also help us to create events, make personalised campaigns, make contributions etc.

In Drupal 7 by default we can't send html mail, since Drupal will convert all emails to plain text before sending. This could be overridden using Drupal 7 htmlmail contributed module. We may also need i>mailsystem module for implementing htmlmail, which is a dependency. The module also give html mail template, which could be customized as well in same way of theme templates.

This is a common question among Drupal beginners, when do not want the login block to display in our site. In most of these cases the login block would be turned off in the administration. We can get access to the login screen simply through the following URL.

Today most of websites are hacked by malware and viruses, Security is an important part of websites. Follow these steps to recover hacked Drupal site.

Webform module is a perfect solution, if you are looking for a more complex contact form or multiple feedback forms to add to your Drupal 7 website. This module will enable you to create and manage as many forms as you need. Recently, we had a need to create three different feedback forms for a Drupal website. One of the webforms was a contact form to connect with different contact persons of the company where as, another one was to send enquiries about the products and there was a guest book page to leave feedback. Here is how we achieved all these requirements in one shot using the webform module.

Suppose your Drupal projects handles products which can be purchased through online. And you are using Ubercart PayPal and Ubercart Payment modules to handle payments related to purchase. Either registerd or non registered user can buy the product. User can use paypal through two ways. "Can purchase through sandbox environment or Can purchase using credit card". So a tester can test the paypal functionality using both these ways. Here I am going to explain how can you test the purchasing functionality through Sandbox.

This is a simple and easy way to theme an ubercart shopping cart block in a Drupal site. When we enable ubercart in our Drupal website we will get a block called shopping cart. This block will show us number of items in which are added to cart. When we use our own theme this block may not looks good, but we can theme it in a very easy manner. This article can be useful if you want to theme shopping cart block in Drupal.

Owl carousel, Is a responsive image or content carousel with various customization option. Views has an owl carousel plugin to making it easy for the integration of owl carousel with Drupal.

We had faced an issue with invoice sent by authorize.net, for anonymous purchase a product in ubercart in one of our Drupal 7 site. After the purchase is completed, the user receives an invoice from authorize.net. But if the user is anonymous, the invoice's customer id is set as zero. We had sorted out the issue and fixed it. Read on to know how to solve this problem

Drupal views help in querying and displaying information fast and it becomes so hard when it comes to custom table fields to be accessed in the view arguments. To help Drupal views understand the exposure of modules and custom table data, we use hook_views_data().

Drupal 7 has a contributed module "Nodequeue" which allows users to collect nodes in an arbitrarily ordered list. It provides a simple drag-and-drop interface to manually order any queue. If you want to create a node to the nodequeue programmatically then you need to read this article. For creating you need to have two things: node id $nid and the queue name queue_name. Here how it can done, we firstly load the nodequeue by name and then add the node to the queue using function nodequeue_subqueue_add. Below code snippets adds a node to the queue.

Drupal 7 provides a flexible supports to create a Taxonomy. There is powerful core module called Taxonomy which allows us to create, manage and apply vocabularies. In Drupal, the terms are gathered within "vocabularies". Taxonomy has a ability to add taxonomy fields to vocabularies and terms. When we come across inserting the taxonomy terms programmatically, we will need to add fields values to that taxonomy term. So In this section we are going to create a custom field values to the taxonomy terms. Below is the code snippet, that is the array structure to create field values.