Ramblings

By Erik, Sun, 05/29/2011 - 23:46

Setting up a Mac development environment

There are many ways to get Drupal running on your Mac. OS X comes preinstalled with PHP and Apache, so theoretically, you'd only need MySQL. Acquia makes a separate version that includes Drupal, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (aka DAMP) already set up. This version is great if you really want to get up and running quickly. It's tied to the Acquia distribution of Drupal which has some extra features that we don't tend to use for our development. What I've found a reasonable compromise has been to use MAMP (a Mac application that provides - Apache, MySQL, PHP) and customize my own Drupal installation.
By Erik, Sun, 05/29/2011 - 01:24

Updating Drupal Core without command-line tools

(No drush!?!? #inconceivable) With all of the fancy ways to upgrade Drupal core floating around: drush, git, diff, patching. What if you only have FTP? As always, the first steps are to a) plan, b) backup, and c) be flexible. It always helps to have a plan. Write it down, think it through, practice on something other than your production site. The basics for updating a Drupal minor version (eg., 6.20 to 6.22) are that you need to save your /sites folder and anything that you've made changes to outside of the /sites folder. Usually those changes might be to .htaccess or robots.txt.
By Erik, Thu, 05/26/2011 - 18:46

How I update Drupal core

When new security releases come out for Drupal, updating is definitely something that you want to do sooner rather than later. My philosophy has generally been to update my local setup immediately, let all of our developers/users know that I am going to update the shared dev server within two days, then schedule a time to update production based on any issues we find with the dev server. Since we run most of our sites as a rather large multisite, it means updating everybody at once, but hey, that's what dev's for, right? Well, we'll leave that for another discussion.
By Erik, Mon, 05/23/2011 - 16:46

Moving from sites/all

Recently, we have been moving away from using sites/all to store modules and themes because we heavily use multisite setups and need to keep the sites contained and independent. To change a site away from using sites/all, I djinn'ed up a drush command that looks to see what's being invoked from sites/all. drush sql-query "select filename from system where status=1 and filename like 'sites/all%'" which will give a return delimited list of the filenames of modules that are enabled: sites/all/modules/cck/content.module sites/all/modu
By Erik, Thu, 11/11/2010 - 02:20

Localhost and Drupal Multisites

So I have set up my localhost with MAMP and I don't want to muck about with Dynamic DNS or constantly editing my /etc/hosts file to be able to bring down Drupal sites from multisite installations on our company servers. At work, we run a bunch of Drupal sites out of a single Drupal code-base (aka multisites). There are lots of domains, subdomains, etc. There's no problem at work for this, we've got it under control, but when I want to pull one of those sites down to my Macbook to do some playing, I have to do things a little differently.
By Erik, Wed, 11/03/2010 - 15:03

Login Destination snippets

Typically, upon login, users are directed to the page from which they logged in. If that is "/user" then you are brought back to the user profile page. If you would like people to be sent to specific pages after logging in, there are a couple of modules that can help. LoginToboggan (http://drupal.org/project/logintoboggan) is one of the most common login tools, and as the project page shows, it does many different things from allowing users to login with their email address, giving you a small horizontal login block.
By Erik, Sun, 09/27/2009 - 14:42

Theming the User Login Block

I had a question posed to me about how to change the "Request new password" text on the User Login block, so I did a little investigation and came across a great article by Addison Berry of Lullabot that did basically what I wanted, but only to a different form.
By Erik, Mon, 09/08/2008 - 15:54

My birthday present -- Sept 6

I remembered in the morning that my father had at least one if not all of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies on DVD. So off to my parents house to raid the movie Library. While there, I got the second and third Pirates movies, the second Matrix movie (just in case there was something about the Oracle from the Matrix) and just for good measure, a new Dilbert book. I watched the third Pirates movie first because it was "At the End of the World" and about half way through got to this dialog:
Gibbs: Look sharp, men.
By Erik, Sun, 09/07/2008 - 01:40

My birthday present -- Sept 3

So on my actual birthday, I thought briefly of going on my quest before work, leaving at 5:30am or so. But fate, tiredness, and kids who needed to get ready for the first day of school put a damper on those plans. So I remained patient and waited until my important meetings were over at work and decided that on my birthday, I could leave a little early. At 3pm, I left for Ipswich.