General

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; }

To ensure the security of confidential data in your Drupal site, testing has to be done to determine whether it protects its data and at the same time maintains its functionality. Web applications are always prone to unauthorized access to or modification of sensitive information. The testing done on the applications to remove such anomalies is called security testing. The following are some of the test cases for assuring the security of a Drupal website Authentication

Here are some basic SEO tests that you can perform on your Drupal/Non-Drupal website. Whenever a change is made in your site, run these tests for better results and for good SEO ranking. All these test cases points out to possible problems in the Drupal/Non-Drupal website. The observations and results of these tests can then be passed on to the web developer for updations.