Blogs

Recently a client asked me to write an introduction that he could present to his business partners about myself and why I use drupal. Sanitized text of my response is below.

*******

I appreciate the opportunity to share a little about what I do and how I can help your organization.

sometimes it's useful to check for the existence of two classes in an element before applying a style to it. For example, if you have a front page that has a different width sidebar than an interior page, you could use a separate page-front.tpl.php file, kind of overkill of your just changing the width of the sidebar.

Another option is to use what http://www.bennadel.com/blog/680-Defining-A-CSS-Selector-That-Requires-A... calls multi class selectors.

.front.sidebar-left #content{ width:760px; margin-left:436px; margin-right:-1196px;

• Using the Installation profile Wizard (no Drupal 6 version)
• Features module (can only enable after site has been built out, making it difficult to deploy using Aegir Hosting system)

Sometimes after installing a drupal site on a new server, or slicehost slice, you'll get a message in the Status Report pages, "The GD library is missing or outdated". If your sure the GD libraries are installed (most likely they are) make sure that you've turned them in in your php.ini file.

In most distros it can be found at /etc/php/php.ini or if your on shared hosting you may have a special one just for your account.

Do a search in the php.ini file and make sure that the extension is enabled.

extension=gd.so (enabled) vs ;extension=gd.so (disabled)

I have several Drupal 5 Multisite installs. I was able to run "drush update -l www.example.com" on several of them successfully, but a few of the installs failed with "The command 'drush.php update' could not be executed."

Cryptic indeed.

There is a drush patch to provide more helpful error messages (http://drupal.org/node/449090).

but in my case it was just that the Drupal Core "Update Status" module wasn't enabled on the offending sites.

Troubleshooting the "Drush was not able to start (bootstrap) the Drupal database." when trying to run in on a localhost configuration.

Many thanks to Chris Wells from Redfin Solutions for this troubleshooting tip on getting drush to work in a localhost configuration.

In the settings.php file, try changing

$db_url = 'mysqli://username@localhost/example';
$db_prefix = '';
to
$db_url = 'mysqli://username@127.0.0.1/example';
$db_prefix = '';


comment #12 http://drupal.org/node/502252

If you want a particular block, to only show on pages with a specific taxonomy term, drop this snippet into the block visibility field


if ((arg(0) == 'node')) {
$node = node_load(arg(1));
foreach ($node->taxonomy AS $vocab) {
if($vocab->tid == 185){
return true;
}
}
}
return false;

Of course, they're are much more elegant ways to handle this using views/arguments

IE Favicon issues, .htaccess and the Boost Module for Drupal 6

I recently spent a significant amount of time tracking down an issue on a client site where the favicon.ico file would display properly on all browser/os combinations with the exception of IE ( all versions).

After checking the usual suspects (corrupted favicon.ico file, proper file size/format, permission settings, etc.) I started to dig a little deeper, trying to think of things that would affect display.