A blog about web development and Drupal.
When setting up content types on a more involved site, a developer could easily end up with having an enormous list of fields in one single content type. When this happens, I tend to pause for a second, and think through whether there is any way to consolidate that list. Chances are, I find a field or two whose values either depend on other fields or can be generated without user input. These are the exact scenarios where the Computed Field module can be a great choice. Computed Fields lets you define an algorithm to calculate the value of a certain field, freeing the end user from having to…
Debugging is an integral part of any development process, and the time it requires tends to add up to a significant part of the total development time. Therefore, it is wise to consider various debugging tools and select the one that fits your working habits and conditions best to save time.
Although the CCK3 module had never seen a full release, it was still worth upgrading Drupal 6 sites from CCK2 to CCK3, because the latter added a very compelling tool to CCK's arsenal: Multigroups. This feature allowed users to group several fields together, and enter multiple values into that set of fields as a whole by repeating the field group whenever a new value is added. For instance, let's suppose your node has an event multigroup containing date and location data. If you were to add a new value to this multigroup, a new set of date and location fields would appear, and you could enter…
Mobile devices are gaining incredible popularity when it comes to accessing web content. Web site owners and web developers are facing the challenge of having to serve all the needs of mobile users as well as web users. I have recently been given a chance to work on a Drupal site that serves web users and mobile users from one singe Drupal installation. The idea of serving mobile sites with Drupal has long been around. Apart from the fact that mobile is an important focus of Drupal 8 development, a host of good contributed modules exists for previous versions that aim at making Drupal mobile…
Drupal has a setting that allows you to put the site off-line, and show a maintenance message to the visitors. However, in order to determine that the site is in off-line mode and load the maintenance page, Drupal still needs to boot up to some extent, which involves loading several PHP files and connecting to the database. This may lead to the visitors seeing error messages, if the site is being tampered with while they try to access the site. The problem stems from the fact that the massive amount of files that Drupal has cannot be replace instantly, and the site may be in an inconsistent…