drupal

This is going to be a more philosophical post than usual, with not a code snippet in sight. I'd like to share some thoughts on the motivations for, and benefits of, submitting patches (I'm talking about Drupal, but this could just as well apply to other open source projects). In case it's not obvious, the title is a reference to the ghostbusters theme tune!

This week I found myself trying to debug some code used in an autocomplete CCK widget on a Drupal site. Because this is code is AJAX and doesn't follow the normal pattern of a full themed drupal page load, many of the unglamorous but useful debugging techniques such as dumping arrays and objects as drupal messages or JS alerts are no help; the only message or alert I was seeing a lot of was a 500 error dialogue.

For my recent post comparing compression methods for database dumps I had some very simple data, and wanted to present some very simple charts. None of the many charting modules for drupal seemed to be simple enough for me, so I borrowed some code I found on the web and made my own drupal module.

I like to have automated daily database backups set up on my servers - for those hosting relatively small sites, the database dumps can usually be compressed down small enough to be sent as an e-mail attachment by the cron script which does the database dump. This is a really simple and cost-effective way of having offsite backups which provide daily snapshots of sites which are easy to access if anything goes wrong.

I built Calcutta Rescue a new website on Drupal 6 during a period of volunteering I did in Asia.

The design for the site was done by the excellent Simon White of whitewebs.

I built Peoples Empowerment Foundation a new website on Drupal 6 during a period of volunteering I did in Asia.

The design for the site was done by the excellent Simon White of whitewebs.

The site uses Drupal's built-in multi-lingual functionality, along with i18n and related modules, to support content (and administration) in both English and Thai.

Some of Drupal's CCK modules such as filefield and imagefield have support for a neat Upload Progress meter.

You may have seen a message in the status report of your Drupal site saying something like... "Upload progress not enabled - Your server is capable of displaying file upload progress, but does not have the required libraries. It is recommended to install the PECL uploadprogress library (prefered) or to install APC."

This article illustrates using the *nix commandline to chain several commands together to automate a repetitive task - in this case preparing some drupal modules into neatly labelled directories.

The example here covers quite a few different useful commands and commandline techniques, which we can't really hope to cover in exhaustive detail; there's plenty of good documentation out there for everthing we mention.