Technical Blog

There are many situations where you need to print a view within a node in your Drupal website. A good example would be a portfolio page showcasing the Drupal websites you have done using a view slideshow that showcases screenshots of your work. It is not directly possible to print a view within node just like there is no direct method to print a block within a node. However as Drupal is a very flexible CMS and there are methods to print just about anything and that includes printing a view within a node.

If you are creating a View using the Drupal Views module and if you want to filter nodes based on nids (Node > NID filter) then Views gives you options to filter it based on a single argument of the nid. Currently there is no direct way to have multiple nid filters in Views similar to "Is one of" for Taxonomy. However there is a workaround to achieve that. Read onto find out more.

Some Drupal users have reported that there was a conflict with an external Jquery script and the Views Ajax. This occured when the Drupal user wanted to use the external script for some specifc purpose. The conflict was causing the Views UI to break. If you are experiencing this issue in your Views read on to find out the solution.

If your Drupal site has a group of nodes ordered chronologically and you wish to randomly show one of the first five most recent nodes each time then you might face a small roadblock. SQL has no way to do this and therefore there is no way Views can execute this directly. However there is a workaround to make this work. Read onto find out more.

Some Drupal Views users have encountered a Page not found error when they tried to navigate to the new Views Page files display they had created. This occurred after the preview page worked correctly and showed the correct test file in the table. It is not very clear what causes this error in the first place but there are multiple actions you can take to fix it. Read on to find out more.

Drupal Gmap module is a very useful module for embedding the functionality of Google Maps in your website. Currently the only way to access this map is to go to the "yoursitee.com/map/node and find all the relevant info on a single map. There is no direct way to access i location nodes on a single map, inside a block or panel pane, or on pages other than yoursitee.com/map/node. However there is a workaround for this. Read on to find out more.

Drupal Views can be displayed as both blocks and pages. If you want the View to be embedded in a node in your Drupal site then the obvious choice would be to display it as a block. View blocks can be embedded in a node as any other block by calling a set of functions like block_load and drupal_render. However it is not directly possible to pass contextual filters as arguments to those functions if your View uses them. Read on to find out how to pass contextual filters to a View embedded in a node.

Are you looking for an easy way to delete hundreds and thousands of nodes in your Drupal CMS? We all know how to delete it using the normal admin panel which forces us to select all and clicking the delete button again and again. If you are a lazy person then probably you don't like to waste your time to find some stupid script to delete all nodes. In fact there is no need to do that, since somebody had already done that. I am saying about the Devel Generate module. Yes, Devel Generate to delete nodes!

While trying to fix an issue with Drupal Views, I wanted to use a single custom table to store the char count of the body field of different content types instead of creating separate CCK fields for each content type to store the same. The question that came to my mind was how to integrate my custom database table with Drupal Views? Drupal's Views module provides a hook for doing this - hook_views_data().

When migrating from Drupal 5, the normal path would be to migrate everything (core/modules/themes) to the latest Drupal 5 versions, and then to the latest Drupal 6 versions, and then over to the Drupal 7 versions. How fortunate would have been the developers assigned the job if everything was as simple as that!

The default behavior of drupal_redirect_form in Drupal 6 is to redirect the user to $_GET['q'] when an explicit redirect location is not set in $form_state['redirect']. So any form submission from a Drupal page with additional querystrings like in a paginated form (for example admin content listing forms or admin comment listing forms) will result in the querystrings being lost. This can be frustrating when you administer content from such forms as you have to click the pager link and go back to the previous page after form submission. This can easily be fixed by adding a submit handler for the form in question and setting form_state redirect correctly.

The default comment moderation system in Drupal 6 is crude at best primarily because of the limitation of the admin comment listings. The information that is shown by default are 'Subject', 'Author', 'Posted in', 'Time' and 'Operations'. Now the main objective of comment moderation is to reject spam comments. None of these fields give any information about whether the comment is a spam comment or not and you will have to view each comment by going to the edit view of the comment and then approve or reject the comment. This is a very laborious and frustrating process. You have three options to solve this problem and get a better comment administration interface - one is to create a comment view, another is to alter the default comment administration form and the third is of course a custom solution for comment administration.

This is how you would normally render a view display passing filter inputs via code: $view = views_get_view('view-name'); $view->set_display('display-name'); $view->is_cacheable = FALSE; $filter_1 = $view->get_item('display-name', 'filter', 'filter_1_id'); $filter_2 = $view->get_item('display-name', 'filter', 'filter_2_id'); $filter_1['value'] = "value1"; $filter_2['value'] = "value2"; $view->set_item('display-name', 'filter', 'filter_1_id', $filter_1); $view->set_item('display-name', 'filter', 'filter_2_id', $filter_2); dpm($view->render());

Blocks are regions on a Drupal website that show small but significant pieces of content. Blocks are an important component from the perspective of a Drupal website. Blocks are usually assigned to regions in a page and they are supposed to be printed on a page. However there are many instances where you might want to print a block within a content. It is not directly possible to assign a block to a region within content (node in Drupal speak) as you can do with a page. But as with everything in Drupal there is a way to do that.