General

How to delete nodes in bulk programmatically from a drupal site?

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Drupal Technical | 2 min read
What do you do when you want to delete multiple nodes from a drupal site? You go to admin » content and then delete nodes one by one? No. You go to PhpMyadmin and delete the nodes from the node table?. Absolutely not (don't even think about it). There are a few solutions. There is the Views Bulk Operations module. But there is an easy hack to do this or for that matter bulk node operations.
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Zyxware delivers SMS Gateway Integration with Drupal

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Drupal Technical | 1 min read
Drupal is an extremely versatile platform when it comes to the ease of integration with other services or APIs. So we did not have a second thought when a client of ours came up with a request to create a website to provide Free SMS Service. We decided to integrate the SMS Gateway API with Drupal and create the site.
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Problem with fixed width layouts and percentage based widths

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Application Development | 2 min read
While designing fixed width layouts it is advantageous to use percentage based width for inner containers in the layout to make it easy for easy scaling up of the layout for other widths. When doing so you should be very careful about setting the actual percentage values. The percentage based width should result in a whole integer as the width. If not, you will end up with fractions as widths of containers leaving the rounding off to the browsers.
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Customize RSS Feeds generated by Views2 in Drupal 6

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Drupal Technical | 2 min read
The Views module in Drupal provides a Feed display that will allow for site owners to publish the content on their sites as RSS feeds. However, unlike a page or block display, the feed display does not allow for addition of custom tags inside the feed using the Views administration UI. There is however a way to add custom tags, attributes and values into the generated feed using hook_nodeapi.
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Automatically tweet your latest articles and shortened URLs from Drupal

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Drupal Technical | 2 min read
If you use drupal as a blogging platform you would want to auto tweet your new posts on to twitter. Twitter and Shorten module provides you with the basic framework required to do this and all you will need to get it working is to configure these modules. There is also a small patch that has to be applied to the twitter module (until the patch goes into the CVS) to allow the use of shortened URLs in the tweet.
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Login Script to automatically connect to your Asianet Dataline Internet connection

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Technical Solution | 3 min read
Asianet Dataline is an ISP in Kerala and they use a web browser based authentication system to log the user onto their network. One of their most popular plans the - Homenet 475 offers free unlimited downloads from 2AM to 8AM. Now if there was a way to turn on your system at 2AM, automatically login to Asianet and turn your download manager on and then shutdown at 8AM it would have been perfect. The only problem is that the http based authentication system makes it a bit unwieldy to automate. Well not really :-). We have created a bash script to automate this login process.
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How to create custom regions in node.tpl.php in Drupal 6

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Drupal Technical | 4 min read
Drupal allows very fine grained control over how content is presented to the end user. The presentation layer is abstracted beautifully and cleanly designed hooks allows for moving data from the logic layer to the presentation layer. The template file that handles the basic page layout of every drupal site is page.tpl.php and the different regions available for a given theme are all available as HTML elements in page.tpl.php. Another important template file is node.tpl.php which decides how nodes are presented to the end user.
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Programmatically set a Views filter in Drupal 6 and Views 2

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Drupal Technical | 3 min read
Views is one of the most complex of all Drupal modules and one of the most useful of all Drupal modules. The only downside is that, since it is very complex, not too many people have been able to contribute to the documentation of the module. If you search Google for finding out how to programmatically set a filter in Views2 you probably wouldn't find any help. Here is how you do it.
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Export RSS feeds to remote ftp sites from your Drupal website using Views

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Drupal Technical | 3 min read
Feed API provides a powerful means of importing feeds from other sites directly into your Drupal site. What if you want to export your feed as an XML file to a content distributor who wants it on his FTP site? There is of course the traditional approach of using curl to read your feed URL and dump the text as files on to the ftp site. There is not much control that you have over this process. However doing this via Drupal Views will give you fine grained control over the process
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Create Short URLs on the fly in your drupal website

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Drupal Technical | 3 min read
SEO requires you to have descriptive titles and URLs matching the title. But when you want to publish your URL some place where the length of the URL is an issue you definitely want short URLs. One solution to the problem is to use URL shortening services like tr.im to shorten the long URLs to short and sweet 9 character urls. But the URL will lose your sites identity. Don't worry there is the drupal way to solve this problem.
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We love Drupal - It is official now

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News | 4 min read
We have been working with Drupal for the last 3 years now and we just love Drupal. Every day we work with it, we get more and more reasons to love it even more. As a token of our respect for this system, we have become official paid members of Drupal association. We can now proudly flaunt the association badges on our site.
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Fixed: Ubuntu Startup slows down at Starting Mail Transport Agent (MTA) sendmail

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Technical Solution | 2 min read
If you install sendmail on your desktop and have not configured your system correctly you will very likely come across this problem. Ubuntu boot up slows down considerably and stops for a long time at the "Starting Mail Transport Agent (MTA) sendmail" line. This is because sendmail is trying to resolve your host and times out failing to do so. You can fix this problem easily by making a few changes in to yours hosts file.
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How to handle traffic spikes on a Drupal website without a dedicated hosting plan

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Drupal Technical | 5 min read
The dream of every person starting out to build websites is to reach out to as many people as possible. Not very many actually make it to more than a few hundred visitors per month on a regular basis. But with the profusion of social bookmarking sites, there is a chance for some of these low traffic sites to get bursts of very high traffic once in a while, for ex: when they get slashdotted. The question is how to outlive such spikes in traffic, without burning large holes in your pocket
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Top 25 OpenOffice Extensions You May Want To Know

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Technical Solution | 9 min read
OpenOffice is possibly one among the finest examples on what can be achieved in the world of Free Software. For starters, OpenOffice is an office application suite in the lines of Microsoft Office and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. The latest stable release is OpenOffice 3.1. You may want to know how to install OpenOffice 3.1 in Ubuntu. Now let us take a look at the list of extensions you could use in OpenOffice.
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