drupal
Cleaning Up After Migrating To Drupal
Submitted by greg.harvey on Wed, 17/02/2010 - 13:35We 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:
MainArticle.aspx?m=33818&amid=30301119Getting Stuff Done
Submitted by joachim.noreiko on Tue, 16/02/2010 - 17:07Basically, 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.
Services, or How I Learned We're All Just Secretly hook_menu()
Submitted by joachim.noreiko on Wed, 10/02/2010 - 23:02I 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.
Multilingual Drupal: Some Dos And Don'ts
Submitted by greg.harvey on Sat, 30/01/2010 - 14:06So 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:
- 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.
Why Is Writing Drupal Documentation Harder Than Writing Wikipedia?
Submitted by joachim.noreiko on Thu, 28/01/2010 - 20:51I 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.
How Drush Make Just Changed My Life
Submitted by greg.harvey on Thu, 28/01/2010 - 11:18Note: 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
Importing Nodes Using The Batch API
Submitted by graham.taylor on Thu, 28/01/2010 - 11:09For 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 –
- The XML structure was fairly custom (it was coming out of one of our internal .net databases – euugh!)
Wrapping Up: A Linux Script For The End Of The Day
Submitted by greg.harvey on Wed, 27/01/2010 - 11:47Here'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.
Drupal Help Haiti: Day 4
Submitted by greg.harvey on Sat, 23/01/2010 - 00:52Ups 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.
OpenID, I'm Starting To Understand
Submitted by greg.harvey on Fri, 22/01/2010 - 12:14Important edit: Seems it doesn't work with Google Apps accounts - apologies to Zach in the comments, you were quite right. I'm revising this post. However, it does still work as described with all Google Mail domain accounts (e.g. personal Google accounts).
So, OpenID. Been about for a while. I kind of knew how it worked. I also knew I had dozens of OpenIDs, all in places of no use to me whatsoever that were generated automatically when I signed up for some service or other.

