For field tokens, the token value is generated by rendering the field with the "token" view mode, i.e. with whichever formatter is set up on Node Type > Manage Display > Tokens. If you don't have the Tokens view mode configured, it will fall back to the Default view mode; which by default santitizes text field values, i.e. replaces things like hypens with '.

So in order to fix your labels: enable the tokens view mode and set the field formatter to Plain text.

Alternatively you could also use the field tokens provided by the entity tokens module, as they are not sanitized by default and show up correctly. I'd recommend the other way though, because the tokens list gets a bit confusing with duplicate field tokens. (To tell them apart: token module field tokens use underscores, like [node:field_name]; and entity token module uses hypens, like [node:field-name]).

Panels variants can easily be used to create a mobile version of your website. If you’re already using Panels, you need one module: Mobile Tools (http://drupal.org/project/mobile_tools). It contains a plug-in for Panels, making it easy to create a specific variant for mobile.

First, create your normal page layout using Panels. Then, create a second variant and when you add content (or in the content settings), choose "Mobile" for your build mode.

It’s as easy as that!

There is a situation where a field of a View needs to pull its content from two fields (aka cck field) of a node. In my case, they were default author field and a custom field called contributor. This example used Drupal 7 and Views 3.

If (optional) contributor field was not empty, it would display the contributor and skip author field. If there was no contributor, then the author, which cannot be optional, would be displayed by default.

My basic recommendation is that if you are building a large, complex site that is supported by professional staff, Drupal is the clear choice. If you're building a smaller site with non-technical staff administering it, WordPress is the way to go. Everything in between is a toss up based on the particular requirements of the organization in question.

Drupal will NOT load any javascript (including jQuery and drupal.js) if it “thinks” that they are not required. It will only load the scripts if any other module or script requires them. For example, if you add scripts in your .info file or using the drupal_add_js() function in the hook_init(), Drupal will detect it and load its scripts.

Now, let's assume that you developed a module that adds its own scripts in hook_footer() using the drupal_add_js() function. At the time when hook_footer is executed, it is too late for Drupal to add scripts to the header and hence jQuery and drupal.js will not be added. If your javascript depends on them you will see error messages in your console such as:

Drupal is not defined
jQuery is not defined
The solution is to include at least one script earlier – for example in hook_init() so that Drupal loads its scripts.

So, just wanted to share the little shell script I use for setting up local development sites in a one-liner in the terminal. Be advised that I don't usually write shell scripts, so if you are a pro, and I have made some obvious mistakes, please feel free to give improvements in the comment section. Also, while i have been writing this post, i noticed that Klausi also has a kick ass tutorial and shell script on his blog. Be sure to read that as well, since the article is much more thorough than mine. But since my script is for those even more lazy, I decided to post it anyway.
The idea I had was pretty simple. I constantly have the need to set up a fresh, working copy of drupal in various versions with various modules, i.e for bug testing, prototyping, or just testing a patch on a fresh install. While drush make and installation profiles are both awesome tools for a lot of things, I wanted to install Drupal without making make files and writing .info files, and at the same time generate the virtual host and edit my hosts file. And why not also download and enable the modules i need.

Views 3 now supports queries against Google Analytics. I've added this experimental module to the 7.x-3.x development release of Google Analytics Reports.

Create a page outside of the CMS workflow that has access to Drupal's built-in functions.

There are scenarios, the deeper you get into Drupal, where you will need to access Drupal's database and functions, but outside of the scope of the CMS. For instance, you may need to create an AJAX callback that hooks into the database for a TinyMCE plugin, or you may be looking for ways to port over a custom CMS to Drupal… These are just a couple of reasons for having an easy way to hook into Drupal at the base level. And like with everything Drupal, there is a Drupal function for this: drupal_bootstrap($phase = NULL, $new_phase = TRUE) Before we show how to use this function in code, let's break it down a little.

It was about a year ago that I wrote my first post on the best Drupal 7 themes. At the time, it was slim pickings coming up with a list of strong choices. Fortunately, a lot has changed since then. 

A couple quick points before we get to the themes. The criteria I used in putting this list together has changed a bit since last time. First of all, these are all free themes. Extra points were awarded if the theme uses responsive design or an installation profile, especially if it includes a WYSIWYG. These are things that I think show extra attention to user experience.

The subject of navigation in responsive Web design (RWD) is both exciting and challenging. Best practices are emerging for smaller, boutique-style sites, but for sites with larger anatomies, it’s still the Wild West, especially when it comes to migrating legacy information into a new design.

Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned working on a recent real-life, large-scale RWD project. Specifically, this post focuses on how we chose to deal with deep navigation in the landscape of a templated environment.

pjax is a jQuery library that takes regular old page navigation links and turns them into triggers for fast and unobtrusive ajax content loading. Thanks to modern browser features, page URLs, titles and browser history are all updated as usual, even though the pages are not actually reloaded. Like magic!
pjax takes advantage of a recent addition to the browser toolbox: the HTML5 History API. This API allows a JavaScript driven web application to push paths into the browsing history, making it possible for the user to use the back and forward buttons on dynamic content changes, just like with regular page loads. Take a look at the pjax demo to get a quick idea of how it works!

Before the History API, the only way to keep history state and provide permalinks for dynamically loaded content was by using a hack that involved URL fragments, which is a common technique that has recieved some criticism recently.

Wait, doesn't Ctools already provide a node plugin that lets you put existing content into panels?
Yes, but placing content with the panels interface is cumbersome for editors. When it comes to selecting, creating and placing node content in panel layouts in an easy yet sophisticated way, the regular panels interface falls short.
We thought about how to enhance the plugin so that editors would be able to either select existing content more comfortably and customizable with views or create a new content right from within the Panels interface.

Drush Rebuild
I wrote a simple utility, Drush Rebuild, to help me manage the process of rebuilding a local development environment. Drush Rebuild doesn’t make assumptions about your repository structure (Drush Make, entire codebase in repo, etc), nor does it care about extra steps you need to take when configuring a development environment, like disabling caching, adjusting connections with 3rd party services, and so on.
Instead, the utility provides a framework for executing rebuild scripts for a given site, using the power of Drush aliases and the drush php-script command.

A guide to patch review
Long ago, before I ever made my first whitespace-error-ridden commit to a contributed module, webchick wrote a post describing how she reviews patches and invited others to do the same.  Three-and-some years later, I have an answer. :)

A few months ago we completed a Drupal 5 to Drupal 7 migration project for a North Carolina museum website. Actually the Drupal 5 site was more of a Frankenstein site; the previous developers had more or less built their own CMS on top of Drupal. Fortunately, the superb Migrate module made writing migration code for this project a snap.
Getting a workflow together, however, was a bit more of a challenge. We had four people working on the project: two developers, a site builder, and a themer.
Because the project was complex and contained a number of different components, we agreed that development would work best with each developer building aspects of the site on their local machine. That way my work in writing migration code would not interfere with our themer's work, nor would it bother someone working on site building.
The key ingredients to a local development first workflow are git, drush, drush_make (now included in Drush 5), installation profiles, and Features.
In this blog post, we'll review some of the workflow and tools we used for development. We'll use a fictitous "MySite" project for our example.

Upon investigation, we found that one view was responsible for most of that time.

However, the query execution itself was fast, around 11 ms.

But, the views rendering time was obscenely high: 2,603.48 ms!

So, when editing the view, you would see this at the bottom:

Query build time 2.07 ms
Query execute time 11.32 ms
View render time 2,603.48 ms
Since this view was on each page, in a block on the side bar, it was causing all the pages of the site to be slow.

The underlying reason was really bad coding in the views-view--viewname.tpl.php, which is too long to explain. But the gist of it is that the view returned several thousands rows of taxonomy terms, and was was supposed to render them in a tree. However, the actual view template just looped through the dataset and did not do much and displayed static HTML in the end!

The solution for this was quite simple: enable Views caching.

To do this, go to the view's Defaults, then Basic settings, then Caching. Change to Time Based, then select at least 1 hour for each of Query results and Rendered output.

Save the view, and you will see a positive impact on performance of your pages.

DrupalGap bridges the gap between Drupal and mobile device applications. This open source project is built around PhoneGap and utilizes the power of JQuery, JQuery Mobile and of course Drupal.

Drupal 7 can be used with Varnish and other reverse proxy servers if configured correctly. This blog post highlights how you can control your cache with Drupal, the Varnish module and the Cache Actions module.
Using a reverse proxy cache is an efficient way to cache your web site in order to get faster response times. Drupal 7 works with reverse proxy cache servers like Varnish out of the box and the integration can be extended by using the Varnish module. I'm going to show you how the integration works in this blog post.

As far as WYSIWYG editors go, CK Editor is awesome, but the default UI icons are chunky and ugly.

I found a thread that offers a rebuild on the default icon set, based on Fugue icons by http://p.yusukekamiyamane.com:

http://cksource.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=42302#p42302

These are way, way, way sexier. A must have for CK Editor.

See attached screenshot for an example, and icons.png for the replacement icons file.

Note: the attached icons.png replaces icons.png in /ckeditor/skins/kama/ if you are using kama as the default skin. Should be a simple drag and drop, but make a backup!

CKEditor has an advanced feature that forces all pastes as plain text. This removes everything but I much prefer that than having a site that is broken. It doesn't take that long to make a couple of headings, links and a list with a small wysiwyg editor

The language negotiation is extendable, you just need to implement hook_language_negotiation_info(). In there, you can do whatever you want, like always default to swedish for now. It also looks like you can limit to what languages you can switch to, I am not sure how that exactly works, though.

Not sure what to do once you add more languages, but you could for example call other negotiation callbacks in yours and fallback to swedish if it not one of the languages you want displayed.

To create a variation of an existing theme, you could simply copy the desired theme's directory to sites/all/themes change the theme name in a a couple of places and start hacking away. But duplication is a waste of disk space. More importantly it creates an unnecessary maintenance overhead: if an improved version of the original theme comes out, you'll have to merge it with the changes you made in the various files of the overridden version.

Enter subthemes. Subthemes inherit all style sheets, javascript and templates (.tpl.plp files) from the theme they declare as their base. You don't have to hack into the base theme code, which means that when a new version of the base comes out, you automatically inherit all the improvements!

We put almost all of our Drupal sites behind the excellent Varnish HTTP accelerator, and it gives us a massive performance boost for most site visitors. However it seems to have a tendency to crash without warning and occasionally just dies, leaving our sites down.

We workaround this issue by using another piece of useful kit, called Monit, that keeps an eye on processes on your server and restarts them if necessary.

Installing and configuring Monit is really simple (these instructions are for a Debian based server):

By replacing Drupal's core search with Solr, it's possible to gain very fine control of the results. Not only is Solr very flexble, but the apachesolr module is generous with its hooks. One potential use is boosting the score based on dates, so that recent documents receive a higher relevancy score. We've used this for a ticket calendar to help visitors find upcoming events.

As we enter the 2011 Holiday season, who doesn’t love a freshly updated Drupal 7 contributed modules list?

These modules are great stocking-stuffers for every Drupaller on your list!

In all seriousness, as I mentioned in my last top modules list, the sheer number of Drupal modules (in the thousands) can be very intimidating. For the new developer how do they decide which modules to use? Google search can help you find a module for a specific use case, but it doesn’t help you find the most common modules that seasoned developers use on every site.

So what I have done is trimmed my list down to the top 50-ish modules that I am most likely to use on any given project. Most of these modules I have used on real projects, many of them have been carried over from Drupal 6. Several of these are new Drupal 7 modules that didn’t exist in Drupal 6 and some others are Drupal 7 replacements for Drupal 6 modules.


I hope that this helps both newbie developers as well as newcomers to latest version of Drupal. Enjoy!

There are a lot of places, where you need client's IP address in Drupal (or any other CMS/web app of course). The problem arises, when you use a reverse proxy server (like Varnish), since every request to web server will be done by the latter. We will have every single visitor of our website coming from a single IP (reverse proxy), as a result.

Drupal is smart enough to overcome that. Reverse proxy servers can be configured to forward original client IP in a request header (usually X-Forwarded-For). This value can be used on web server to know where our visitory come from. In Drupal we have function ip_address(), which will read and return client's IP. If we take a look at this function's code, we can see that it already has support for situations, where reverse proxy is used. This function will still return Varnish's IP address by default, though.

Thanks to this project and others, Migrate module now knows how to import into all the various Drupal features that make up a social networking site. You can import friends, points, groups, flags, etc. Go forth and confidently re-launch you social networking features with Drupal.

In this screencast we'll create a simple "Flat Rate" shipping service.

If you are working with code based deployments instead of using CMS to push out changes, you might have already implemented something similar.

There are 2 approches to implementing this:

modulehammer shows you which drupal modules a web site uses and generates a makefile so you can build one just like it with a single line. Tell your friends!

Drupal Commerce is currently the leading solution for building Drupal e-commerce websites.

We're going to give you a first look over Drupal Commerce, showing you how to get up and running. This won't be a detailed tutorial but introduce you to the key features. We'll show you the main modules that Drupal Commerce relies upon and will give you important resources to learn more.

Tonight I needed a coupon on one product on a site that only sells one product. I didn't really want to deploy and configure Commerce Coupon, so I just did it with a quick combination of a line item field and a rule.

Here's what I did:

Add a "coupon" field to the line item
Create a product pricing rule that checks to see that when the right product is in the line item and the right value is in the coupon field, apply a discount. (The rule is attached to this article.)
That's it.

I have built a site with Magento and it is a nightmare to change the theme or really anything not in the database. They also have some strange bugs for data in the database that sometimes prevents pages from loading or the customer from being able to pay.

I have used OpenCart and its user interface is very similar to Magento, but from a development and theming standpoint it rocks compared to Magento. Plus it has much lower system requirements and doesn't hide its documentation from unpaying eyes. Also the code and code structure is much easier to follow.

I just started using Ubercart on Drupal and I like it a lot. I don't have enough experience to tell you a ton about it. But I can tell you that combined with Drupal's Views and other features it will make a pretty easy to setup, killer website.

I spent about two months trying to use Drupal Commerce and kept running into the Achilles Heal of the package. That is the fact that in order to create and display a product (and update) you have to double your work. You have to create the product entity, then the product display node, for every single product. It has known problems with attributes not syncing between these things and it is such a headache to do all this that I wouldn't give it to a customer ever until they get this fixed. This is a huge known issue and this alone makes sure that it will never be ready for clients to use until it is resolved.

Here's another rule, I just wrote that someone else might like. When a new user registers, it checks whether he/she is my friend on Facebook. If so, he/she is automatically unblocked and added to a role. This makes sense on a blog-type of site.

För att kunna ta fram en modern internwebb, måste vi först tillgodose några grundläggande behov. Valet och implementationen av ett innehållshanteringssystem, ett CMS (Content Management System) är ett viktigt sådant. Vi måste ha ett verktyg för att kunna hantera vårt innehåll på önskvärt sätt.

I början av 2011 tog Informationsavdelningen därför hjälp av en oberoende expertkonsult inom området, Martin Edenström (då Cybercom Group AB), för att utvärdera ett antal olika alternativ. Tillsammans genomförde vi en standardiserad utvärdering för att säkerställa ett framtidssäkert val av CMS för KI.

Vi tittade på sex olika utvärderingsmodeller för CMS. De modeller som listar hundratals små detaljkrav är knappast längre intressanta, då dagens moderna CMS i princip kan svara positivt på samtliga frågor. När alla verktyg klarar av samma sak, blir det mer intressant att titta på andra kriterier.

Following up on Aegir installation tutorial, we'll actually be using Aegir, starting with creating platforms and sites. We'll explore both methods of setting up platforms: manually and using drush make.

Websites are no longer viewed only on a desktop screens. More and more smartphones, tablets and netbooks are introduced to offer new and more convenient ways to access web content everywhere. In this article, Symphony Themes introduces two FREE Drupal 7 themes, Alphorn and Conch, which support display in various devices from smartphones, tablets to laptops and big screen computers.

In the Drupal Conference London 2011 last month, Tom Deryckere showed some figures of the mobile penetration on his session "Bridging gap between desktop and mobile publishing with Drupal": 

Facebook: 200M mobile users, 2x more active than Desktop users
Twitter mobile: 50% of total active users, 40% of all tweets.
Only 21% of Google's largest advertisers have a website that is optimized for mobile.
In fact, Morgan Stanley predicts at the current rate of change and adoption, mobile Web usage will surpass desktop Internet usage by 2015. Therefore, websites in next generation must, either adaptively or responsively, support mobile devices.

In order to show how a mobile website looks, Symphony Themes introduces two Drupal 7 themes, Alphorn and Conch, available for FREE download.

Once the module is installed, any multi-value fields will have an additional "How many values to display" option. Even Taxonomy Term fields that Drupal provides on the default Article content type can be controlled; if users are allowed to create their own taxonomy terms using free tagging, this prevents heavily-tagged articles from cluttering up the front page with dozens of tag links.

Because the display limits are implemented in a field formatter, you can set up different limits for each display mode an entity supports. For example, you might display five photos on a teaser, ten in an RSS feed, and unlimited photos in the full version of a node.

In addition to the half-baked, single-purpose product features mentioned above, Drupal core still carries around very old cruft from earlier days, which no one cares for. All of these features are not core functionality of a flexible, modular, and extensible system Drupal pretends to be. They are poor and inflexible product features being based on APIs and concepts that Drupal core allowed for, five and more years ago.

Drupal core blocks its very own modernization and innovation, and started to heavily lack behind competitors and the overall industry in the past years. It is a stupidly old, poor, and monolothic beast.

Drupal core is not maintainable anymore. There's too much cruft. Too many half-baked features that no one actually maintains.

I’ve been developing custom applications with Drupal for three years, a little with 4.7 and 5, primarily with 6, and lately more with 7. Lately I’ve become concerned with the trend in Drupal’s code base toward increasing complexity, which I believe is becoming a danger to Drupal’s adoption.

You’re probably here because you’ve the delightful task of creating a multilingual Drupal 7 installation.
Things have been going OK, you downloaded and installed i18n, switched some translation modules on and happily started inputting content and adding translations.  You figured it was time to created some front pages, of course a separate one for each language, otherwise what’s the point. You figure it’s as easy as creating and translating other nodes, so you do that, set the default front page, take a look, switch the language and…. it doesn’t work!

With the release of Drupal 7 earlier this year, it's a great time to take a look at some lesser-known modules that you might find yourself using in the future. None of these 7 modules are considered top-tier modules...yet. In fact, none of them are even in the top 150 most downloaded modules. Modules were selected based on their usefulness and their proven ability to do something extremely well without getting in the way of other tasks. In fact, the majority of these modules are quite small demonstrating that you don't have to write 10,000 lines of code to make a big contribution in the Drupal community. All module statistics are accurate as of publication deadlines.

klausi has already posted a nice, actually working nginx configuration for Drupal on his blog. This configuration is intended for Drupal installations installed on separate (sub)domains. However, recently I came up with the need of having multiple Drupal installations in sub-directories for my development environment. To achieve that I've created the following location directive:

Drupal is a great platform for building web sites as it can quickly and easily get a site up yesterday. Eventually, some customization will need to be made to a website's code to implement evolving features and designs. A small markup change here, a text alteration there, or modifying a function like user_load(), and in most cases Drupal will continue to work fine. While all might seem OK, without realizing it, your site has been Hacked!

Well, not hacked in the way that a site is broken into maliciously, but hacked in that Drupal itself or contributed modules have been changed on your site. Without knowing what has been changed, it can be very difficult to track down bugs, as the code on your site is no longer the same as the code everyone else is running. Updating Drupal or contributed modules becomes a huge hassle, and important security updates are often ignored due to the work involved in re-implementing code hacks.

Install profiles are core to our development process; everything from the data structure down to the smallest module settings are captured in code, using Features, Context and Strongarm and packaging everything using our beloved Drush make and install profiles. This approach has significantly helped us improve the quality and speed of our developments.

So rocktreesky is finally running on Drupal 7. I upgraded the site a few weeks ago and thought I'd share my experience. This is a very simple blog site so my upgrade process was fairly simple and easier than it would be for almost any other site out there, although the overall approach is going to be the same with most sites. I got the site upgraded in a weekend, but even as stripped down as this site is, I had to drop features to complete the upgrade. On the flip side, Drupal 7 provided a bunch of little niceties that meant I could remove some custom code from my theme (and overall I really like theming with Drupal 7). Overall, the upgrade was pretty painless for me, but I wouldn't recommend firing up an upgrade for most sites right now, unless you have the time and resources to put some muscle into it. I'll walk through my process and some decisions I made to see why I come to this conclusion.

The standard procedure to upgrade Drupal to the latest release is to download it from drupal.org and follow the included UPGRADE.txt.
For administrators using the UNIX shell it may be easier using the attached patch files below instead of downloading and installing the newest complete Drupal release.

first of all: CloudFlare really excels with Drupal based web sites! After a bit of trial and error, we've by now figure out some optimal performance gainers fiddling around with both Drupal and CloudFlare settings and we would like to share these insights with you guys!

Today, Drupal released a security/bugfix for Drupal 6 and 7, bringing the latest version of Drupal 6 to 6.22.

Aegir is well known for making site upgrades very easy, fast and safe by way of the Migrate task. But some users might be wondering how to make the Aegir 'frontend', which is a Drupal-6 site itself, run on the latest version of Drupal without having to reinstall Aegir entirely.

Field Validation is a new arrival to the Drupal module directory: its 1st release was just a week ago, and it's designed for Drupal 7's new Field API. What does it do? Field Validation allows you to add simple validation rules to custom Drupal fields, using a simple UI.

The module was inspired by Webform Validation, which adds similar validation to WebForm components. Right now, only basic regular expression validation rules are supported support but the module provides hooks for implementing other validation rules.

Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 recently added a default (and sensible) .gitignore file to the standard repository, and while this solves some problems, it has also caused some confusion. (issue)

Here's a link to the actual new .gitignore. Essentially, it excludes the sites/default/files and sites/default/settings.php files from git source control.

While creating mutlilingual Drupal sites is getting easier with each release, and each new major version of the contributed modules involved, it still requires you to understand the basic building blocks and plan ahead to find the right tools fit for your job. My article series is aimed at highlighting the thinking behind different components and detailing the sometimes admittedly obscure steps involved to set them up. Note that each article was (to my best attempt) accurate at the time of writing, and the articles are not updated as the tools change. I hope they will be useful for some time.

For close to a decade, the CVS version control system has been an integral part of every Drupal developer's workflow. Many site builders could get by downloading release versions of Drupal and assorted modules, but using bleeding-edge code, contributing modules, and submitting bug fixes or enhancements to existing projects all meant getting comfortable with CVS. In March of 2011, that all changed: all of the projects hosted on Drupal.org were migrated to the Git version control system! If you're struggling to get your bearings in the new Git world, this article should help with the transition.

Ethan Marcotte established the idea of responsive web design in his 2010 A List Apart article of the same title.  Succinctly, responsive web design is device-agnostic content presentation. A responsive design looks great on a desktop monitor, a tiny phone screen or a large format display.  This brief paper first details where responsive web design fits in the front end design stack. Then it will describe how a responsive web design is constructed.

Varnish is an amazing and incredibly efficient tool for serving up common resources from your site to end-users. Besides simply making your site faster, it also can add additional redundancy to your setup by acting as a full backup if the web servers fail. In order to make Varnish both serve as an effective backup and efficient caching layer, it needs to clean up incoming headers from the browser, strip down cookies, and consolidate the "Accept-Encoding" header.
After such extensive explanations it's easy to get overwhelmed, but the good news is that the VCL file provided here can quickly be deployed to almost any Drupal site and start working immediately. For most sites no further customization is needed, and sites that need to tweak it will have a good head start towards huge reductions in server load. On our sites, Varnish is usually able to handle about 85% of the traffic without ever touching the web servers. Even during peak times with hundreds of thousands of requests coming in per hour, Varnish can hum along at less than 5% CPU usage of an average 4-core server. Instead of scaling out your web servers horizontally, adding a few Varnish machines in front of them can save a huge amount of processing and speed up your site at the same time.
If you haven't already, grab the actual default.vcl file that we use on our sites and read it through start to finish. Now with all of the individual pieces explained in-depth above, we hope you can use it as a starting point for your own VCL configuration. Happy caching!

I've spent a lot of time working on making sure my smaller Drupal sites (mostly run on shared hosts or very small VPSes) run lean and mean. This helps the pages load faster, users are happier, and my hosting providers don't have to shut down any of my sites, even when they're under pretty heavy load.

Here are my three recommendations for making your Drupal 7 website run great on a shared (or low-end VPS) host:

Aegir Mini VPS is FAST – 256MB burstable to 4GB RAM, 4 core 2GHz CPU, MariaDB with XtraDB, Pressflow Drupal core, Memcached and Redis fast caches. SSH and FTP access. Standard and custom palettes possible. Boost compatible. 8 sites. 1 GB storage. 80 GB transfer/m. Aegir UI simplified for beginners, with how-to in an easy to follow screenshots. Self Managed – a dream tool for Drupal hosting startups and design studios, easy to use and expand. 100% white-label. One our Apache Solr Search Core included free when paid yearly.

With Drupal 7 around the corner, a lot of Drupal developers and users are surely looking at their lingering still-on-Drupal-5 sites and thinking, "surely I might be able to skip Drupal 6 and upgrade directly to Drupal 7?"
Most all experienced Drupal developers would say (to end-users), "not possible". This is because modules only provide upgrade paths from one major version to the next, and just about all Drupal modules received large rewrites between Drupal 5 and Drupal 6. Without help from module developers, it's not extraordinarily difficult to do a direct Drupal 5 to Drupal 7 migration, but you are going to be building out a lot more things manually.
Of all the projects I'm working on, only my personal blog was still on Drupal 5. As this is rather embarrassing, I figured at least it would be a good experience with direct migration from D5 to D7. Here are my experiences and the approach I used in this upgrade.

Eclipse is an open source IDE (Integrated Development Environment), that provides many tools for coding in one application... the most useful of which is probably PHP debugging. This section will provide instructions for installing and setting it up for use with Drupal.

Eclipse is a Java application so it can run on Linux, Mac and Windows, but comes with the price of a large memory footprint.

Hopefully this tutorial will help you setup smoothly. If not, stay with it. Getting debugging working is well worth the effort.

I had the same issue, and searched for an answer for a while (even trying other modules for redirecting on logon). Finally I found this solution that works for Rules.
What you do is add a condition for your redirect rule, with the following php-evaluation:

if (arg(0) == 'user' && arg(1) == 'reset') {
return false;
} else {
return true;
}

This checks if the user is using a one-time password, if that is the case the redirect rule is not triggered.
Hope this helps!

A2 Hosting offers an up-to-date version of Drupal as a one-click install with the Softaculous module. If you'd like to install the latest development release, our web hosting packages come loaded with everything you need - Apache 2.2, MySQL 5.1, PostgreSQL 8 and PHP 5 compiled as an Apache module with access to php.ini settings through .htaccess.
If you decide to go with a custom installation rather than using Softaculous, Drupal is ready to go from the moment you download it. It even has an easy-to-use web install

What is a makefile?

A makefile is a macro for installing Drupal. It contains a list of files that can be fetched using the power of drush, the command line tool for administering Drupal.

Using this generator you can specify different Drupal core distributions, modules, themes, and external libraries like jQuery or WYSIWYG editors.

The end result is a small text file containing the DNA for a specific Drupal setup — YOUR perfect setup!

Drupal 7 includes a big re-factor of the way CSS and Javascript are aggregated. What does this mean for your sites? In short:

You will see a greater number of files compared to D6 - this is normal and not usually cause for alarm. Surprisingly, more files is sometimes better.
To ensure efficient aggregation, the most important thing developers can do is choose the parameters to drupal_add_css and drupal_add_js carefully. And if you encounter contrib modules that are using the wrong parameters, please file patches!
This was a somewhat controversial change, and understanding the new strategy (and how to override it) requires going a bit deeper.

Previously, all files were merged together into one giant file (at least within the same scope or media type). This strategy worked well on simple sites with few or no contrib modules. Unfortunately, many contrib modules in D6 incorrectly add conditional* CSS and Javascript files – resulting in changing aggregates as you browse from page to page. If even a few lines af code differ, the entire aggregate (including large libraries like jQuery and jQuery UI) must be re-downloaded, consuming extra bandwidth.

If you haven't already heard, Drupal 7 will default to using the InnoDB storage engine instead of MyISAM for MySQL (though a MyISAM database will continue to work just fine in Drupal 7). This is fairly substantial change within Drupal core, and as the thread in the issue queue I linked to shows, there were a lot of questions and apprehension about it. However...

...we are going to just skip over a lot of that apprehension and get down to point of this article - there's no good reason not to hop right into using InnoDB today on your Drupal 5 or Drupal 6 site. The rewards are; a possibly significant improvement in performance, a definite improvement in scalability (most highly trafficked Drupal sites have been using InnoDB for some time now because of this), and you'll start getting used to working with what will be more and more common in your Drupal-life, InnoDB.

When I got my first iPhone two years back I adapted the theme here on xdeb.org to work better with it. I documented it in my post Make a Drupal theme look better on the iPhone.

During the holidays I got to try out the iPad for a few days and found ways to make the xdeb.org theme work better for it as well.

The new module Webform MySQL Views can, combined with the Data module bring Webform submissions into Views.
For non-Drupalists, this seems just a long list of modules and/or nonsense words. For those of you who have tried to get Webform to work with Views, this is really good news. This 10 minute screencast shows you how to do it.

Recently I was involved in a project to convert a site into a mobile site for Drupal. During the process I had to overcome a number of problems – problems which pretty much everyone designing a mobile site will have to solve. This series of articles covers a bit of theory, the practical problems and the various decisions I made. Hopefully it will help some of you out. The solutions offered may not be the best or only solution by any means – in many cases you need to decide what is best for your site or setup.

Following the release of Drush 4 and picking up on a couple of suggestions made by Moshe Weitzman and Nick Thompson on my previous Drush 3 Automated backup post, it was time for a revised post.

Drush 4 makes it really REALLY easy to backup all your sites, no more bash scripting etc.

Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) out there. To mark the new year, Drupal 7, the next major version of Drupal, is being released! In this article, I’ll walk you through some of the most exciting new features.

There are 3 quick, simple and easy ways to gaining Drupal performance by tweaking it database. There are some component in Drupal 6 categorized as "huge RAM eater". Search native from drupal always suck our Server without mercy. So, i have some tips for solving this.

1. Convert all database MyISAM into InnoDB
MyISAM have level locking problem and InnoDB have fast performance at Join Query which Drupal have it so many.

The result is obviously, that Hiphop has by far the most advantage over a "normal", e.g. PHP+APC Drupal, install, a whopping 30%. Also, the gains from the PHP extension in any case are rather minor (2-3%).

An additional result is that sadly Drupal 7 is much slower (60%), at least for this page.

I can't seem to find any documentation on the "~/.bbedit" options
available or how I might find an example of one (one doesn't exist on
in my home directory). Any pointers to documentation would be helpful.
In case there isn't good documentation, my particular goal is to leave
my tab-width at 4 spaces and use tabs as my default (my current
settings), but for a particular project directory only (a Drupal
directory) to use a tab-width of 2 spaces and auto-expand tabs. What
should I put in the .bbeditSettings file for this project to achieve
these results?

SiteCloud is an up-and-coming player in the field of low-cost cloud hosting. From the outside, they look a lot like your average host: For $8/month, they promise to provide you with unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, shell access, and good old cPanel. Yes, the popular point-and-click site management tool is now available in the cloud.

But what exactly is "the cloud" and why should you care? SiteCloud uses load-balanced server clusters, which they claim provide "more scalability, reliability and performance" than regular web hosting. By pooling the resources of multiple computers, they should theoretically be able to outperform traditional hosts like AN Hosting (who also offer unlimited storage, bandwidth, shell access, and cPanel for $8/month).

How to work more efficiently with some Drush-Bash tricks
While Drush is a big time saver, the textbook version of some commands can become lenghty at times:

$ drush pm-enable faceted_search
$ drush features-revert nuvole_news
An out-of-the-box Bash completion for Drush is in the works, and the Drush shell ("drush core-cli") already offers fast access to commands and fancy features. However, if you prefer not to leave your shell and use a stock Drush, here are some tips for a faster Drush experience involving aliases and autocompletion.

Comment Notify is a lightweight tool to send notification e-mails to visitors about new, published comments on pages where they have commented. Comment Notify works for both registered and anonymous users.

Other notification modules do not allow notifications for anonymous users. Comment Notify fills that niche. (Read post comparing the different comment notification modules.)

Providing comment notifications for anonymous users is an important tool in bringing anonymous users back to your site, which helps convert anonymous users to registered users. Anonymous comment notification is a critical tool in building a blog comment community; all the major blogging platforms include this functionality.

Usually when a user goes goes to a file URL, the file will show in the browser if the browser supports it. Image files like png, gif, jpg almost always show in the browser. Archive files like zip, tar, and gzip almost are always downloaded. Some file types show up in some browsers but not others, svg files will display in Firefox and Safari, but not Internet Explorer 7. Internet Explorer will usually try to show Microsoft Word files (doc and docx) in the browser, while most other browsers will download it.

To add consistency or to force certain files to download, you can fix this by simply adding an .htaccess file to the files directory. Note this only works with Public downloads and an Apache web server.

The default Varnish config for Pressflow by Four Kitchens is an excellent starting point and gets you up and running with relatively little pain and effort. Having done a fair amount of Varnish tweaking for my personal and work websites, I came across a couple of varnish tweaks that resulted in a phenominal improvement in Varnish Hit rate.

There are quite a few modules that attach their own logic to CCK fields. Up until now those modules had to have their own DB or set their own variables.

In CCK 2.5, hook_widget_settings_alter() got in, which allows your module to hook into the field settings, and rely on CCK to save and load those settings when needed.

But that's not all - as the settings are becoming part of the CCK field defention it means that when you'll export the CCK to code - your module settings will be there. Your module now actually has import/ export functionality without you even having to bother about.

All you need is to pack your CCK code export in Features.