One of our Drupal clients wanted us to display the different categories (taxonomy terms in Drupal speak) in their Drupal site as a tag cloud. If you are facing the same scenario in your Drupal site then read on to know how to create a tag cloud using the Drupal Cumulus module in your Drupal site.
Articles
With Drupal 8 in the works a lot of Drupal 6 sites are currently upgrading to Drupal 7. We get quite a few queries on Drupal upgrades and almost everybody asks for a fixed price estimate for the process. In theory Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 upgrade process is an automated process (except for the upgrade of theme and custom modules) and all you have to do is to take the site through a set of standard steps for the upgrade. However upgrades don't always work like that.
A lot of clients come to us asking for running Drupal updates on their sites. However almost everybody asks for a fixed price estimate for the process. There is however a challenge in this because updates would mostly run without problems but you might run into a problem or two once in a while. We have a standard and safe process of running Drupal updates but the safe practices followed in the process would take considerably longer time than blindly running updates on the live site.
My requirement was to detect the mobile devices from the drupal backend and redirect the user to the assigned URL. For this we needed to identify whether the user was accessing the site from a mobile device. For this we had to check the user agent string and compare that with the most common mobile devices. Then depending upon the condition we redirect the user to the corresponding URL.
Drupal is a powerful portal framework and a content management system. However the power of the system can really be tapped into if the site is built right. Whether a Drupal site is built right or not is not something that may not be very obvious in all scenarios or for an untrained eye. There are definitely implications for not building Drupal right but the implications may not be very evident always. So how do you know if a Drupal site is built right?
Finding drupal developers in the market is rather easy but how do you know if the developer you are hiring is a good Drupal developer? Unless you are a good developer yourself it is going to be difficult to evaluate the development capabilities of a developer you are planning to hire. Unless you are a good drupal developer you will find it difficult to evaluate the knowledge of the Developer in Drupal. However this is not that bleak as it looks. There are some simple mechanisms you can use to find out how good a Developer you are dealing with is.
Quite often we get support requests from clients who believe that 95% of their site is working fine but for a few lingering issues which their previous developers could not fix / complete. In most cases the lingering issues are more symptoms of bad builds than pending issues. In such cases we usually insist on a full Drupal review and audit of the site before we work on the issues. The client would normally be shocked to know that there were a lot of things on the site that were not done right but it would be too late for any corrections by the original developers. So how do you know if your Drupal site is built right?
Zyxware is pronounced as "Sixware"
In phonetic notation this is written as
zikswe(ə)r
The name was coined by using three common alphabets used for naming variables in mathematics - x, y and z - and merging them with the 'ware' in software or hardware creating a new word that rhymes with both software and hardware. The letters x, y and z are also important in mathematics as the names of the three axes used to define 3 dimensional space.
Drupal is pronounced as "Druppel" with 'D' as in 'D'o, 'ru' as in T'rue', 'ppe' as in 'Pe'n and 'l' as in Tel'l'.
I had a requirement where I had to execute shell command from PHP. The requirement was that I had to find details of a domain using commands like whois and then store this information into files in a folder. The only input parameter for the process was the name of the domain which was passed on from the Drupal site. The PHP function (shell_exec) was designed to do things like this.
In one of our recent projects we had to show a slider for a price range. The slider was to be used to show all products with prices between a minimum and a maximum. If we set filters in they will be shown as text boxes. For our project the client requirement was to show a slider above these text-boxes. See the screenshot. The JQuery UI has a good slider widget which will gives the graphical version of these range. We can use this widget with our views 'in between' clause.
One of our Drupal clients who had been using the Drupal Ubercart module had requested us to change the status of the order after a user completes the Ubercart checkout completion process. If you are facing the same situation with Ubercart in your Drupal site and would like to know how to change the order status programmatically then read on to find out the solution.
Drupal Views provides pagination options. However at a glance the number of items shown in a page seems to be limited. However there is a way to change the number of times shown in a Views page dynamically. If you want to know how to change the number of items displayed in a Drupal Views pager number dynamically then continue reading.
When you want to dynamically create content from some raw data in Drupal, you might have to create a node programmatically. This comes in handy when you want to use custom forms to collect user input and then create nodes using the the input collected. If you want to know how to programmatically create a node continue reading.
As the World wide web is starting to resemble the wild wild west, you have to ensure that your Drupal site is always up to date. If you are ignoring the security updates of Drupal, then you are simply making your Drupal site vulnerable to the worst enemy of all - Negligence. Updating a Drupal site requires time and effort which is why most people ignore it. Here is a quick way to update your Drupal site using Drush and Hacked module.
On a recent Drupal project we had developed, we had to use the Drupal date module to display the date in a popup in a custom form. However we noticed that a date description was appearing on the form. If you are facing the same situation in your Drupal site then read on to know how to remove the default date format option added by the date module.
We were faced with a Sensitive Cookie Missing 'HTTPONLY' Attribute error in one of the more sophisticated Drupal applications we were developing. This error occurred when we were trying to get the Drupal application scrutinized for PCI Compliance. If you are faced with the same scenario in your Drupal then read on to find out the solution
PCI is an industry standard designed to review organizations who handle sensitive credit card information to prevent Credit Card fraud and it is important to get your Drupal application scrutinized if it is to handle such information
Boost is a Drupal module which provides static page caching for anonymous users. Boost caches a page when a user first visits a page and the the succeeding users are given the cached version of the page. The biggest advantage of Boost is that it works well in shared hosting environments and it provides fresh content for logged in users. Read on to know how to configure Boost in a Drupal 7 website.
Drupal depends on a cron system to execute period tasks in Drupal. This cron system in turn expects a call to the cron.php file from a client either as a Drupal shell request or as an http request to the Drupal site. The following outlines how to set up a cron job in an Amazon AWS server set up using the bitnami stack.
Some times we need to protect our site from public users and make it available only to selected number of users. For examply you might want to protect your alpha site from the public and from search engine bots. In such situations we protect our site with HTTP password. Follow the below steps for protecting your Drupal site with HTTP password. This was written for an Amazon AWS server but should work on most GNU/Linux servers.