Technical Blog

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.

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.

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

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.

If you create anything other than a very small site using Drupal you will end up using Views and CCK, two of the most important contributed modules in Drupal. Views allow users to dynamically create different presentation of tabular data from the database. However this also necessitates dynamic page titles for pages using views.

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

When you upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 you might run into the following error if the upgrade was not properly done Warning: Unknown column 'serialized' in 'field list' query: SELECT data, created, headers, expire, serialized FROM cache WHERE cid = 'variables' in [drupal 6 "/includes/database.mysqli.inc" file] on line 128 There could be several reasons why the error happened but there is a simple solution to solving this problem.

When things don't work the way you want it to and all it takes is a hack in the core, people sometimes hack the core. You might get the feature working the way you wanted it to but by doing that you would effectively be crippling your drupal installation. There are three main reasons why you should not hack core in Drupal.

// Are you a software developer working on drupal and frequently uses site:drupal.org search on google? Are you tired of typing site:drupal.org whenever you search something drupal related? Well here is our simple solution to your problems. Now you can do drupal site search directly from Firefox.

Drupal 6 was released on Feb 13, 2008, 13 months after Drupal 5 was released. Extending that estimation Drupal 7 should be out around March or April 2009. That is around 8-9 months from now, Drupal 5 will become obsolete. There has been talks going to extend the support life cycle of Drupal 5 beyond the release date of Drupal 6 but nothing as of now. We are happy to announce that we will be able to support people who would like to convert Drupal 5.x modules to Drupal 6.x. If you want help to port a Drupal 5 or Drupal 4 module to Drupal 6 contact us to get a quote for your requirement.

We recently had a customer who had Windows Hosting with IIS and she had two WordPress blogs hosted on two subdirectories on the same hosting space. Windows hosting should be the last thing that should come to your mind when you want to do WordPress hosting as it will never come close to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) functionalities. Now the problem was that she could not set up Permalinks on both blogs. There was an already published solution on how to setup Permalinks in Wordpress on IIS but we had to tweak that a little to get it working in this scenario.

Attachment Size slashdotit.tar.gz (173.55 KB) 173.55 KB Similar to the StumbleThis module that we had created earlier we have created another bookmarking module for Drupal - SlashdotIt module. Unlike the other social bookmarking sites Slashdot is very selective in terms of the articles that get approved from the submission queue also known as the Slashdot firehose. Use this module on your site only if you are sure that you have slashdot worthy content.

Most webmasters do not realize this, but a lot of the content on lot of websites can be accessed from multiple URLs. A simple example would be where www.example.com and example.com leads to the same page. This is a fatal mistake in Search Engine Optimization and search engines penalize you for duplicate content. The correct configuration would be where the above two urls will lead you to the same page but example.com will redirect you to www.example.com with a 301 (Moved permanently) status which will not result in search engines penalizing the page. It is very easy to configure 301 redirects using Apache .htaccess file and the process is the same for a Drupal installation also.

We have added a few new modules to our site recently. Two of these are the StumbleThis module and the DiggThis module. Drupal already had a DiggThis module available for download but there was no StumbleThis module. StumbleUpon has been a popular source of traffic for zyxware.com and we wanted users to have an option to add any of our pages to their StumbleUpon favorites. So we created our own StumbleUpon module.