articles

git commit author - give credit where credit is due

8 February, 2012 - 00:14 — drew

Quite some time ago I wrote a post about how patching makes you feel good in which I talked about the motivations for, and benefits of submitting patches on drupal.org (d.o). I concluded by suggesting that project maintainers should be generous in recognising the efforts of those who submit patches.

increase the memory allocated to jmeter in ubuntu linux

21 June, 2011 - 17:59 — drew

I was struggling with jmeter running out of memory when doing some load testing, and almost all of the instructions I found about how to increase the java heap size and give jmeter more memory were for windows, and talked about editing a jmeter.bat file which I do not have on my ubuntu (10.04 LTS) machine.

Other posts suggested setting various environment variables (e.g. HEAP or JVM_ARGS), but these didn't seem to work for me.

default Drupal contexts like default views

14 March, 2011 - 20:36 — drew

I was using the brilliant context module in a project recently. The fact that it uses ctools means it has a few characteristics reminiscent of views (and panels). One of these is the import / export functionality, and the distinction between the different types of storage for the contexts you've set up - i.e.

using Geany as an editor for Drupal development

8 February, 2011 - 20:41 — drew

In general I'm a happy vim user, but now and again I am asked why I'm using such an antiquated environment. Editor preference is of course a topic over which many long and pointless arguments have been waged - often from intractable dug-in positions of dogma. I think it's good to poke your head above the trench occasionally and see what else is available.

the elusive cursive font stack

15 December, 2010 - 19:53 — drew

There are some great articles and resources out there on the interweb about using font stacks in your CSS to ensure your site has the best chance of working well and looking as it's intended to on any combination of browser and operating system / device you can throw at it.

However, a site I worked on recently used the font all designers love to hate: Comic Sans. Almost all of the advice I could find about this font went along the lines of "it's rubbish - don't use it" (that's the polite version, obviously).

how to increase php memory limit for drush without access to php.ini

29 November, 2010 - 00:56 — drew

I recently found myself trying to use drush to set up a Drupal 6 install on a server where I did not have root access. I kept getting errors along the lines of this: 

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 1234 bytes)

I didn't have permission to edit the php.ini file for php_cli, so I had to find another workaround. The solution's pretty simple and comes courtesy of the drushrc.php file.

simple twitter feed on Drupal 5

8 October, 2010 - 23:25 — drew

I was recently asked to add a simple twitter feed to a Drupal 5 site I built a few years ago. You know the sort of thing - a block in the sidebar with the 5 most recent tweets from the organisation's twitter account. Unfortunately, this turned out to be one of those requests that sounds like it's going to be really easy, but is not (especially on Drupal 5). I came up with a solution which does the job quite nicely, but it's a bit of a hack; I wouldn't do it like this on a new site - but then of course I wouldn't be using Drupal 5.

themeing validation errors for checkboxes in drupal

4 September, 2010 - 15:31 — drew

I came across a problem when working on a Drupal user registration form which had to include an accept terms and conditions checkbox. In fact, I came across a couple of problems, but I only had to fix one myself.

migrating from oscommerce to ubercart

27 July, 2010 - 12:42 — drew

I recently undertook a migration from oscommerce to ubercart. The scope of this migration was limited to the transfer of products (and categories) - I didn't try and migrate customers and previous orders.

installing APC on Ubuntu linux and benchmarking Drupal 6 performance improvement

4 July, 2010 - 16:22 — drew

There are several different PHP accelerators to choose from, but according to wikipedia "APC is quickly becoming the de-facto standard PHP caching mechanism as it will be included built-in to the core of PHP starting with PHP 6".

I recently put together a new development webserver in a virtualbox virtual machine, and as I was setting it up I thought I'd take the opportunity to test how much difference APC actually makes to a simple Drupal site.