Drupal Developers

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| 1 min read
Drupal Views can be displayed as both blocks and pages. If you want the View to be embedded in a node in your Drupal site then the obvious choice would be to display it as a block. View blocks can be embedded in a node as any other block by calling a set of functions like block_load and drupal_render. However it is not directly possible to pass contextual filters as arguments to those functions if your View uses them. Read on to find out how to pass contextual filters to a View embedded in a node.
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| 3 min read
Drupal is neither rocket science nor designed for developers alone. Any person without technical knowledge and programming skills can build and maintain a Drupal website or multiple sites quickly with little effort. There are a number of books which lets users get in touch with the basics of managing Drupal. We have listed out the Top 5 Drupal books for Drupal webmasters. Also checkout our list of the Top 3 Drupal books for Drupal Developers. If instead you want somebody else to do all the managing part you can hire us to manage your drupal website
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| 7 min read
The trick explained briefly We are not actually going to theme the file upload field as it is presently nearly impossible to do that. Instead we are going to put an ordinary looking 'dummy' input text field over the file field. Next we proceed to make the 'original' file upload field invisible but accessible to the user via CSS. So when a user clicks on the dummy input text field they are actually clicking on the file upload field itself. To make it authentic we are going to copy the file path from the file upload field to the text input field via javascript.
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| 3 min read
Are you looking for an easy way to delete hundreds and thousands of nodes in your Drupal CMS? We all know how to delete it using the normal admin panel which forces us to select all and clicking the delete button again and again. If you are a lazy person then probably you don't like to waste your time to find some stupid script to delete all nodes. In fact there is no need to do that, since somebody had already done that. I am saying about the Devel Generate module. Yes, Devel Generate to delete nodes!
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| 3 min read
While trying to fix an issue with Drupal Views, I wanted to use a single custom table to store the char count of the body field of different content types instead of creating separate CCK fields for each content type to store the same. The question that came to my mind was how to integrate my custom database table with Drupal Views? Drupal's Views module provides a hook for doing this - hook_views_data().
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| 9 min read
Ecommerce used to be the preferred ecommerce solution for Drupal before Ubercart came into the picture. We recently worked on upgrading a Drupal 5 site with Ecommerce to Drupal 7 with Ubercart. The challenge with this upgrade was that the source data existed only in the D5 database and the corresponding code to programmatically access the ecommerce data was in D5 as well while the destination tables existed only in the D7 database with the corresponding code existing only in the D7 database. The solution we went with was to go for a full SQL query based migration to copy over the Ecommerce data from its tables to the Ubercart tables.
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| 4 min read
The default behavior of drupal_redirect_form in Drupal 6 is to redirect the user to $_GET['q'] when an explicit redirect location is not set in $form_state['redirect']. So any form submission from a Drupal page with additional querystrings like in a paginated form (for example admin content listing forms or admin comment listing forms) will result in the querystrings being lost. This can be frustrating when you administer content from such forms as you have to click the pager link and go back to the previous page after form submission. This can easily be fixed by adding a submit handler for the form in question and setting form_state redirect correctly.
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| 3 min read
The default comment moderation system in Drupal 6 is crude at best primarily because of the limitation of the admin comment listings. The information that is shown by default are 'Subject', 'Author', 'Posted in', 'Time' and 'Operations'. Now the main objective of comment moderation is to reject spam comments. None of these fields give any information about whether the comment is a spam comment or not and you will have to view each comment by going to the edit view of the comment and then approve or reject the comment. This is a very laborious and frustrating process. You have three options to solve this problem and get a better comment administration interface - one is to create a comment view, another is to alter the default comment administration form and the third is of course a custom solution for comment administration.
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| 3 min read
This is how you would normally render a view display passing filter inputs via code: $view = views_get_view('view-name'); $view->set_display('display-name'); $view->is_cacheable = FALSE; $filter_1 = $view->get_item('display-name', 'filter', 'filter_1_id'); $filter_2 = $view->get_item('display-name', 'filter', 'filter_2_id'); $filter_1['value'] = "value1"; $filter_2['value'] = "value2"; $view->set_item('display-name', 'filter', 'filter_1_id', $filter_1); $view->set_item('display-name', 'filter', 'filter_2_id', $filter_2); dpm($view->render());
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| 8 min read
One of the Drupal sites we maintain had recently started slowing down considerably in spite of the site mostly being static and in spite of boost set up on the server. On examination of the site we found that two things were happening on the site. One was that the site was being crawled indiscriminately by rogue crawlers. This we solved using the DDOS deflate script and setting DDOS deflate to run every 10 seconds. The second problem was that there were some bots which were continuously sending POST requests to /comment/cid/reply pages. For this we had to come up with a workaround.
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| 2 min read
In Drupal every path in the site goes via index.php and goes through some Drupal menu. However to make the Drupal application behave live a typical static website in terms of URL architecture sometimes clients request for adding slashes to the end of virtual direcotry paths. At the same time slashes would not look good at the end of virtual file paths. There is an easy way to do this using apache htaccess rules
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| 3 min read
Blocks are regions on a Drupal website that show small but significant pieces of content. Blocks are an important component from the perspective of a Drupal website. Blocks are usually assigned to regions in a page and they are supposed to be printed on a page. However there are many instances where you might want to print a block within a content. It is not directly possible to assign a block to a region within content (node in Drupal speak) as you can do with a page. But as with everything in Drupal there is a way to do that.
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| 3 min read
Sometimes we get requests to update Drupal sites and get it done in less than 5 hours. If we take the Drupal update through the full fail-safe set of steps for Drupal updates we will never be able to complete updates in less than 5 hours on a site we don't maintain. For such sites when the cost of the site going down may not be too high for the site owner it might not be too big an issue if the update is run on a hit or miss approach. We normally do not recommend such an approach but this should work on most small sites without any issues.
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| 3 min read
Keeping the Drupal core and contributed modules up-to-date (at least on the security updates) is one of the essential steps for keeping a Drupal site safe and secure. Running updates of Drupal modules is usually a straightforward mechanism on a Drupal site that is done right. However what will you do if you do not know how things have been built? What will you do if some of the custom modules used are tied down to specific versions of some contributed module? What if there were custom changes on the site. Here is how you can run updates on a Drupal site almost completely safely.
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| 3 min read
If you run a reasonably popular site there is a very good chance that you will get crawled by unscrupulous crawlers once in a while. The regular search crawlers from the popular search engines like the Google bot, Yahoo bot, Bing bot themselves are pretty intensive when they crawl sites but they do have limits on the number of pages crawled per visit and the number of simultaneous connections opened to your server. However there are lots of unscrupulous crawlers like spam bots, email harvesting bots and even some search engines who do not set any reasonable limits on the number of simultaneous connections to your server. There are hardware solutions that are available to prevent this but they may not be affordable for everybody. There is however a simple netstat based solution to prevent DDOS.