We have just finished a migration job for a client of ours from an old .Net system in to Drupal, the last task of which was to write some Apache mod_rewrite conditions and rules to deal with the URLs of their old website. This proved to be more trouble than I thought, mainly because I struggled to find examples of how this might work.

Firstly, the ground work. The URL pattern to be redirected looked like this:

Basically, an initial patch went in, we opened followup issues for cleanup, the followup issues never got followed up, so what's in HEAD is a bit of a mess. — catch, in a recent issue comment

This happens far too often. I'm not linking to the specific issue in the Drupal 7 queue because I don't want to point fingers; this suffices to exemplify my point.

I am now batting nodes, complete with imagefield, between separate instances of Drupal with merriment and glee. For yes, I do have a working beta of Content distribution.

I'm about to quickly write a service to get CCK's content_fields() array from the remote, distributing site, so that the retrieving site can show a UI of possible values for a Views nodereference argument. Try it. It all makes sense once you do.

So we've done all French sites before. And we've done all English sites before. But a recent project was our first real forray in to multilingual sites and it's an e-commerce/Ubercart job! Talk about gluttons for punishment!

There are bags of tutorials, so I'll keep this short but sweet. A list of dos and don'ts from our painful, recent experience:

1. Don't change the default language after initial set-up. Set your default language right at the start and don't mess with it. Ever.

I used to write on Wikipedia, years ago when it was a wild frontier, we had barely 30 thousand articles, and not even my geek friends had heard of it from a source other than my blathering on about it.

Note: Apparently it works fine with Windows too! See comments.

I'm pretty excited right now. I just tried drush make for the first time. Download it here:
http://drupal.org/project/drush_make

That's an order! You'll need drush too, if you don't have it yet (in which case, shame on you ... call yourself a Drupal developer?!)
http://drupal.org/project/drush

For a recent custom module I was building I was faced with the challenge of having to create a bunch of nodes from data stored in an XML file.

I decided not to use Feeds or Node Import modules for a couple of reasons –

1. The XML structure was fairly custom (it was coming out of one of our internal .net databases – euugh!)

Here's another one of my little Linux admin scripts for all you Drupal developers out there. It's a Linux shell script requiring Drush, MySQL and Subversion, but could be easily modified to work with other databases and repositories and should work fine on a Mac, I think.

Those familiar with Windows (and I guess Mac OSX too) will probably be aware that you can get an é character from your keyboard by pressing AltGr + E. You may not be aware that in Linux you can't. This was a bit of a problem for me, as I live in France, a country who's native language relies rather heavily on the accents in the special character set. For example, the town I'm in is called Uzès and my daughter is called Moïra. It's also been driving my wife bananas, since she actually needs to write emails and letters in French but we have British keyboard layouts.

Ups and downs again today. Some strong support from Europe again, but the US has yielded no strong continuation. Don't get me wrong, we have people in the US interested in helping, and we're extremely gratefful for that, but we don't seem to have a US project "driver", so it seems to drop to pieces.

I managed to make some good progress this morning with Feeds, Views and Panels. And numerous people added to that progress throughout the day, so we actually got a reasonable amount done.