Technical Blog

Password-protecting drupal development site with .htaccess file There might be few scenarios when we need to protect our site from the general public and make it accessible to a selected group of users. One of the most common scenarios in the development workflow of a Drupal site is when you want to avoid your half-complete drupal site showing up in Google search results.For such needs, it is advisable to go for password-protecting the site using HTTP authentication. If you have cPanel installed on your hosting server, you can use the ‘Password Protect Directories’ option from the ‘Security’ section on the cPanel home page. Click here to read on How to enable HTTP Authentication using cPanel (link to an article for the same on our site) For those without cPanel, here’s how to get Apache work your way:

A VPS lies somewhere in between shared hosting and dedicated servers in terms of the features it provides. VPS divides the server’s primary resources and gives you certain amount of diskspace, memory, processing speed and bandwidth, with freedom on the OS configuration. In the case of shared hosting its like a common pool from which you consume bandwidth, diskspace, and processing power until it is exhausted. You dont get much control over the OS config.

When a server is managed by more than one admin, it’s always a challenge to keep track of the changes made to the configuration. And when in a multiserver environment managed by more than one admin, this is going to be more complex. It would have been much saner if there was a utility to handle all this. The ones that we found were quite complicated and was made for handling huge numbers. All we wanted was a very simple utility to do just the job, without much bells and whistles. And so, we started out on our own. Here’s what we have now.

CKEditor Module integrates one of the most popular online editors into the Drupal content management system. This module enables you to have a full-featured and customizable WYSIWYG editor in your Drupal website. In Drupal it is easy to install and configure CKEditor from within the Drupal administration panel. Still having issues with file upload button in ckeditor? Then follow these steps for a perfect CKEditor installation:

The Freedom Toaster from Zyxware Technologies is back. This time at the Santhigiri Fest, 2012. Santhigiri Ashram took the initiative to provide us with a space for Freedom Toaster at the venue of the Santhigiri Fest, 2012. For those of you who may not know, the Freedom Toaster is a kiosk from where you can burn Free Software Distributions and Softwares freely. This time, we have added the latest version of Ubuntu, (Precise Pangolin, Ubuntu 12.04), IT@School and Malayalam Offline Wiki. There are many more Distributions including Fedora, Mint, CentOS.

On a Drupal site that came up for some minor alterations recently we came across an issue where some menu links disappeared for anonymous users while they appeared normally for the administrative users. On digging further we came across an issue with an implementation of hook_db_rewrite_sql in a contributed module. But along the way we had to debug the full process of generation of primary links and how node level access permissions are checked during this process.

As a Drupal developer, when we get an error, we may want to know the functions that are called before the system called the function where we get the error. In this case, views_trace() function comes to your help. This function is available if Drupal’s Views module is installed and enabled.

The simplest debugging tool used most often by a programmer is a print statement, which when placed, used wisely can bring out the weak points of any giant bug.

While developing Drupal sites, sometimes we may wish to see whether our function is getting called or whether we reach a point or not in the execution path. Usually the dpm() or print_r() functions comes handy in the case, but sometimes, we may not be able to see the debug messages printed due to page redirection just after our print.

One of the servers we maintain suddenly started developing performance hiccups. The site running on the server was a fully static website configured with static page caching via boost. The site used to receive a reasonably good volume of anonymous and search engine traffic on a daily basis. The only form on the site was a search form which existed as a separate page.

The success of a website depends on many aspects, its maintenance being the most crucial. Only a well maintained website will have a vibrant impact on the visitors. The below checklist helps you ensure that your Drupal website is well oiled time to time. Backups and Maintenance

Have you ever thought about the security of your Drupal website on the web? If not, it’s high time you did that. Either be the case, here’s a simple checklist to make sure you have the essentials ready:

And so you have a Drupal site. But have you made sure that your site’s content is as required? Here’s a simple checklist to help you with that: User Content

Here’s a simple checklist to make sure you do not miss out any of the essential configurations while taking your Drupal site live: Configuration