Drupal Developers

The Freedom Toaster from Zyxware Technologies is back. This time at the Santhigiri Fest, 2012. Santhigiri Ashram took the initiative to provide us with a space for Freedom Toaster at the venue of the Santhigiri Fest, 2012. For those of you who may not know, the Freedom Toaster is a kiosk from where you can burn Free Software Distributions and Softwares freely. This time, we have added the latest version of Ubuntu, (Precise Pangolin, Ubuntu 12.04), IT@School and Malayalam Offline Wiki. There are many more Distributions including Fedora, Mint, CentOS.

On a Drupal site that came up for some minor alterations recently we came across an issue where some menu links disappeared for anonymous users while they appeared normally for the administrative users. On digging further we came across an issue with an implementation of hook_db_rewrite_sql in a contributed module. But along the way we had to debug the full process of generation of primary links and how node level access permissions are checked during this process.

As a Drupal developer, when we get an error, we may want to know the functions that are called before the system called the function where we get the error. In this case, views_trace() function comes to your help. This function is available if Drupal’s Views module is installed and enabled.

The simplest debugging tool used most often by a programmer is a print statement, which when placed, used wisely can bring out the weak points of any giant bug.

While developing Drupal sites, sometimes we may wish to see whether our function is getting called or whether we reach a point or not in the execution path. Usually the dpm() or print_r() functions comes handy in the case, but sometimes, we may not be able to see the debug messages printed due to page redirection just after our print.

A white screen shows up while submitting a form in your Drupal Site? There could be many possible causes for WSODs (White Screen of Death) in Drupal, such as PHP error reporting settings, memory exhaustion, etc. If the exact reason could be figured out, fixing becomes much easier. For treating this specific WSOD issue on form submit, check for the following symptoms:

In a common secnario if a user types the url of a Drupal based website without the 'www'.prefix they will be automatically redirected to the  required site with the complete url. This is very convenient for most web users who do not want to type in the obvious 'www' prefix. Webmasters can configure this by changing the settings of the Drupal .htaccess file. However this will  be a problem if the Drupal site has a mobile version with an 'm.' prefix. Users wishing to access the mobile version of that Drupal site will inevitably be redirected to the main website.

We are pleased to announce the launch of our new website Top Drupal Books. Here you can get to know all about the Top Drupal books that can get you started in learning Drupal. Find out more on the best selling Drupal books available in the market from topdrupalbooks.com

This is a basic installation instruction for installing Drupal in your shared cpanel hosting account. Although the instructions are for installing Drupal 7 and for installing it specifically on your cpanel hosting account, the steps outlined (or something similar) should work for installing other versions of Drupal or installing it in other hosting accounts. Read the complete instructions before trying this out.

We have recently been toying with the Drupal API module in an attempt to set up our own Drupal API documentation site just like Lullabot did. As of today we have managed to set up something that is fairly functional and somewhat similar to the Drupal.org documentation site. Check out our own Drupal API reference site. The site currently contains documentation about the top 500 Drupal modules and their D5, D6, D7 and D8 versions in addition to the documentation for Drupal 5, Drupal 6, Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.