How To

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.

By default Drupal 7 has two types of views - The Full node view and the Teaser view. This has been the case for all previous versions of Drupal. However if your requirements are different, then you might have to create a custom view that is tailored to meet your specific needs. Check out how to create a simple custom “View mode” for nodes in Drupal 7.

PostgreSQL commonly known as Postgres is an open source object-relational database system which has been around for more than 15 years. PostgreSQL is well reputed with a lot of awards to its name.It runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows. Learn how to install PostgreSQL client and PostgreSQL server in Ubuntu with this step by step tutorial.

Networking in Ubuntu means that you will need to know how to conduct Samba server configuration. Samba is the standard Windows interoperability suite of programs for Linux and Unix. Samba server configuration is essential to seamlessly integrate Linux/Unix Servers and Desktops into Active Directory environments. Here is a step by step tutorial that will walk you through each stage of network configuration using Samba Server in Ubuntu.

The Drupal Menu System handles both the navigational system (visible menus and links) as well as the Drupal callbacks in the back end. The menu links listed on the header of a Drupal site is normally the primary menu or the secondary menu. These menus are sets of static links that you create via the Drupal admin interface. However sometimes it is useful to have a login / logout link in the primary or the secondary menu depending on whether the user is logged out or logged in. Here is how you add this.

Drupal uses a reasonably powerful mechanism to create, prepare and send emails generated within the system. We maintain two modules related to emails in Drupal - Mail Merge and MailQ (Mail Queue) - and get the opportunity to work with the mail subsystem in Drupal. Here is a brief write-up on how the mail system works in Drupal.

When you work on forms in Drupal where you want to have the same form array elements used multiple times in a form you can use the concept of for form tree. For example if you are working on a purchase order form where you want to have multiple rows of product information like say product name, product code, quantity, price etc, for each product added to the form. This can easily be done using the form tree as follows.

Upgrading a Drupal site refers to moving it’s database and files from one major version of Drupal to a later one, to take advantage of the newer features and bug fixes that might not be available for the older version. Upgrading a Drupal site is a pretty effective way to make sure that your Drupal site is currently up to date with all the latest security updates and bug fixes. Old versions of Drupal will naturally be unsupported with the arrival of the new releases. The Drupal community has currently stopped supporting the older versions of Drupal like version 4 and 5 and has moved to Drupal 7. However Drupal 6 is more widely supported. Have a look at the steps required to upgrade your Drupal site from an older version to      Drupal 6.     

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.