Drupal Technical

dpm() or dsm() - Which should you use?

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Drupal Technical | 1 min read
Drupal’s Devel module provides a wide range of functionalities that make a Drupal developer’s life much saner. Of these, the most useful one is the function dpm() which seems to have a twin clone - dsm(). For those who are unaware, dpm() is a highly useful function for neatly printing (pretty printing) arrays/objects etc in drupal. There is also a function dsm() in the devel module, which seems to do the same thing. Then which is the correct one?
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Releasing the Drupal 7 version of uc_echecknet module

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Drupal Technical | 1 min read
The UC eCheck.Net module is a Drupal module that implements eCheck payments using Authorize.Net's eCheck.Net service and is a popular module for online shopping websites using Drupal for making payments along with Ubercart. The module was officially released for Drupal 6. We have managed to release the updated version of UC eCheck.Net to work with Drupal 7 and is available for download.
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How to prevent Drupal's .htaccess rewrite rule from redirecting mobile m._ urls to www.m._ urls

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Drupal Technical | 2 min read
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.
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Drupal Tips: How to create a custom view in Drupal 7

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Drupal Technical | 3 min read
By default Drupal 7 has two types of views - The Full node view and the Teaser view. This has been the case for all previous versions of Drupal. However if your requirements are different, then you might have to create a custom view that is tailored to meet your specific needs. Check out how to create a simple custom “View mode” for nodes in Drupal 7.
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Drupal Tips: How to add dynamic login / logout link to your primary menu

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Drupal Technical | 3 min read
The Drupal Menu System handles both the navigational system (visible menus and links) as well as the Drupal callbacks in the back end. The menu links listed on the header of a Drupal site is normally the primary menu or the secondary menu. These menus are sets of static links that you create via the Drupal admin interface. However sometimes it is useful to have a login / logout link in the primary or the secondary menu depending on whether the user is logged out or logged in. Here is how you add this.
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Using pathauto to create nested terms in URLs in taxonomy term pages in Drupal

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Drupal Technical | 3 min read
On a Drupal site, when setting up pathauto for nodes, sometimes it is useful to have the full nested path of parent terms of the channel (or primary vocabulary) for the article in the url alias to give the impression of a directory structure to the taxonomy vocabulary. This will allow users to see urls to nodes like domain/term1/term2/term3/node-title-or-whatever where term3 is the channel under which the article is published.
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Drupal Security Tips - Simple configuration checklist after you deploy your new drupal site

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Drupal Technical | 3 min read
Drupal is supposed to be a very secure CMS and the Drupal security team is a highly efficient team of people scouting the Drupal camp to find and sort out security issues as soon as they crop up. But no amount of programming will fix security issues caused by incorrect configuration of a Drupal site. Here is a checklist of items that you have to confirm after you deploy a new Drupal installation.
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How to Install Drupal 7 in your cpanel hosting account

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Drupal Technical | 4 min read
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.
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Drupal performance tuning tips - Running Drupal on shared hosting (GoDaddy / HostGator / Dreamhost etc)

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Drupal Technical | 3 min read
Running Drupal on a shared hosting environment could become a challenge when the site starts getting a lot of visitors. So f you run your Drupal installation on one of the shared hosting providers like GoDaddy, Hostgator, Dreamhost etc and your site is reasonably popular then it is likely that you would have run into performance issues if the site is not configured correctly. If you configure your Drupal site correctly you should be able to stick with shared hosting for a longer period of time before moving on to dedicated hosting.
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How to replicate the Drupal API documentation site

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Drupal Technical | 2 min read
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.
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How to programmatically create a form tree in Drupal

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Drupal Technical | 2 min read
When you work on forms in Drupal where you want to have the same form array elements used multiple times in a form you can use the concept of for form tree. For example if you are working on a purchase order form where you want to have multiple rows of product information like say product name, product code, quantity, price etc, for each product added to the form. This can easily be done using the form tree as follows.
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