General

Recently, we had an opportunity to attend a consultative meeting hosted by Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology, Kottayam (RIT) on Academia Industry partnership. The meeting was in the context of the Technical Education Quality Improvement Programme (TEQIP) of Government of India in which RIT is a part. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the possible areas of cooperation between RIT and the different companies present.

We use a VPS server hosted on the web as our shared projects folder to share files between our team members in a safe and secure way. This is set up in such a way that users can mount a folder on the VPS on to their local machines via SSHFS and access contents on the shared folder. The permissions in the folder is managed via a script that is running on the server. The script and its configuration is being managed using an automatic deployment process using git. In the following article we have described how you can set up your own secure shared folder on the web.

We get frequent requests to rebuild existing sites using Drupal. When we get such a request it would help to have a copy of the full site on our local server to make it easier for themers and developers to reuse whatever existing components that can be salvaged from the original site. Wget is a powerful tool that can help mirror websites locally or on any web servers. The command for doing this using wget is really simple.

In Drupal 6, when you are working on a new project and when you change menu items from MENU_NORMAL_ITEMS to MENU_LOCAL_TASK or vice versa you will run into a scenario where the menu_links table entries won't get changed. This can get reflected in menu_links not appearing in your system_admin_menu_block_page listing if you are using it for listing your menu items in a page. The solution is to rebuild the menu_links table for the menu items corresponding to your menu_router items. The solution is simple.

A web developer’s life becomes much saner if he/she has easy access to all page header information. Firefox offers you PLUGIN-NAME that helps you inspect headers. Here is something for the terminally inclined ones among you - wget. To view the http headers give the following command in gnome terminal : wget -S --spider www.example.com

For any site - be it Drupal or non-Drupal, this is most probably due to simple mistakes made while entering attributes. Let us see one very common case where a simple mistake can cause glaring issues: We usually see the css given something like this. We do not see any glaring issue in the class defined below. #header { background:url("images/headback.png")repeat-x; width:1020px; height:120px; font-family:arial; position:relative; }