Drupal Technical

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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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| 5 min read
Drupal is an excellent CMS that is well suited for a small business as it is Free Software. Plus Drupal has a flexible and robust modular architecture that resides in an excellent ecosystem of modules and themes and is serviced by a community spread throughout the globe. Here are 10 essential modules selected from this ecosystem for building a small business website with Drupal. Also check out our list of Top Drupal Performance mistakes. If you are looking for the fastest and most economical way to build your Drupal website, get in touch with us. We offer a wide variety of Drupal services ranging from Drupal migration to Drupal Security Auditing.
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| 6 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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| 6 min read
Drupal provides an extensive collection of community contributed modules that are specifically designed to make your Drupal website more visible to Search Engines. Although high quality relevant content is what ultimately decides your Drupal sites ranking in Search Engines, these modules allow you to further increase your chances of getting better rankings. Having had considerable experience in doing SEO on our own site we have identified the Top 6 SEO modules for a Drupal website. Also checkout the Top 6 Drupal modules for Drupal 6. If you are looking to get professional help to help SEO optimize your Drupal site do contact us. We can provide assistance in Drupal SEO and a wide range of other Drupal Services.
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| 6 min read
If you are planning to build a community website then build it with Drupal. Its core design makes it easy to build a virtual community and most of the functionality required for that is built into it. This can be extended using the following 10 essential modules for building a community website with Drupal. If you want to build your community website in Drupal, contact us Also have a look at the Top 5 most popular modules in Drupal 6
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| 5 min read
Drupal is build to be modular in nature. Drupal's core functionality is provided by a core set of modules. Its functionality can be extended by the use of user contributed modules and custom modules. Currently Drupal has a huge selection of user contributed modules. User contributed modules which were found to be indispensable were later moved to the core. Have a look at some of the Top 5 Drupal modules which have become almost indispensable while using Drupal. Still not sure about what modules to start with for your Drupal site? - We can provide a wide range of professional Drupal services to help you build your Drupal site. Please get in touch with us to know more.
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| 5 min read
Drupal is inherently secure but as with most secure systems there will always be a few security loopholes that could be utilized by a user with malicious intent to bring down the whole site. As usual most of these security flaws lie mostly with the admin users of the website. We have listed down the top 7 security mistakes commonly found in a Drupal website which can be easily rectified by using a simple Drupal Security Checklist. The easiest way to ensure that your Drupal site is build safe is to have it built by experts. Contact Us to build your drupal site for you.
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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
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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| 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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| 4 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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| 3 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