drupal

July 30, 2012

Working with the Drupal Computed Field Module

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.

June 18, 2012

Debugging in Drupal

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.

February 28, 2012

Migrating Drupal 6 Multigroups to Drupal 7 Field Collections

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.

December 14, 2011

Serving Mobile from Drupal

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.

October 4, 2011

Static Maintenance Page During Drupal Upgrade

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.