Technical Blog

By default Drupal 7 has two types of views - The Full node view and the Teaser view. This has been the case for all previous versions of Drupal. However if your requirements are different, then you might have to create a custom view that is tailored to meet your specific needs. Check out how to create a simple custom “View mode” for nodes in Drupal 7.

The Drupal Menu System handles both the navigational system (visible menus and links) as well as the Drupal callbacks in the back end. The menu links listed on the header of a Drupal site is normally the primary menu or the secondary menu. These menus are sets of static links that you create via the Drupal admin interface. However sometimes it is useful to have a login / logout link in the primary or the secondary menu depending on whether the user is logged out or logged in. Here is how you add this.

On a Drupal site, when setting up pathauto for nodes, sometimes it is useful to have the full nested path of parent terms of the channel (or primary vocabulary) for the article in the url alias to give the impression of a directory structure to the taxonomy vocabulary. This will allow users to see urls to nodes like domain/term1/term2/term3/node-title-or-whatever where term3 is the channel under which the article is published.

Drupal is supposed to be a very secure CMS and the Drupal security team is a highly efficient team of people scouting the Drupal camp to find and sort out security issues as soon as they crop up. But no amount of programming will fix security issues caused by incorrect configuration of a Drupal site. Here is a checklist of items that you have to confirm after you deploy a new Drupal installation.

Running Drupal on a shared hosting environment could become a challenge when the site starts getting a lot of visitors. So f you run your Drupal installation on one of the shared hosting providers like GoDaddy, Hostgator, Dreamhost etc and your site is reasonably popular then it is likely that you would have run into performance issues if the site is not configured correctly. If you configure your Drupal site correctly you should be able to stick with shared hosting for a longer period of time before moving on to dedicated hosting.

Drupal uses a reasonably powerful mechanism to create, prepare and send emails generated within the system. We maintain two modules related to emails in Drupal - Mail Merge and MailQ (Mail Queue) - and get the opportunity to work with the mail subsystem in Drupal. Here is a brief write-up on how the mail system works in Drupal.

When you work on forms in Drupal where you want to have the same form array elements used multiple times in a form you can use the concept of for form tree. For example if you are working on a purchase order form where you want to have multiple rows of product information like say product name, product code, quantity, price etc, for each product added to the form. This can easily be done using the form tree as follows.

Broken Link Checker Broken Line Checker is a Wordpress plugin that will check your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you if any are found. Link Checker is the Drupal module to detect broken hypertext links. Currently this module is not available for Drupal 7.

Bad Behavior Bad Behavior prevents spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your Wordpress site in the first place. Bad Behavior is available for Drupal It seems there is no plan yet for a Drupal 7 version and is only supported till version 6 of Drupal

WP Security Scan Security Scan is a Wordpress plugin that scans your WordPress installation for any security vulnerabilities. I Security review is the Drupal module that offers the same functionality will do the same kind of security check for Drupal.

Newsletter Newsletter is a Wordpress plug-in that lets you collect subscribers on your blog with a single or double opt-in subscription process. Double opt-in is law compliant and it means the user has to confirm the subscription following simple standard instructions sent to him via email.

MapPress Easy Google Maps MapPress is is the most popular and easiest way to create great-looking Google Maps and driving directions in your Wordpress blog.

Lightbox Plus Lightbox Plus is a Wordpress plugin that permits users to view larger versions of images, simple slide shows, videos and content all in an overlay. It uses the popular colorbox jquery plugin. Colorbox module for Drupal will provide full integration of the colorbox plugin.

WP- DB Backup WP-DB-Backup is a Wordpress plugin that allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database. In Drupal the Backup and Migrate module (is the best automated backup solution integrated with Drupal.)

WP e-Commerce WP e-Commerce is a free WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin that lets customers buy your products, services and digital downloads online. Ubercart is the popular tool for ecommerce applications in Drupal. It is a superior e-commerce solution available when compared to the wordpress equivalent and has tons of features.

WP-Super Cache WP-Super Cache is a Wordpress plugin that generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. Boost is the popular alternative in Drupal for static page caching.

Redirection Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections and keep track of 404 errors without requiring knowledge of Apache .htaccess files. Path redirect is the popular alternative in Drupal

Simple Tags Simple Tags add some tools for taxonomies like Terms suggestion, Mass Edit Terms, Auto link Terms, Ajax Autocompletion, Click Terms, Auto terms, Advanced manage term In Drupal: By default Drupal taxonomies support tags with auto-complete option. Other features like tagcloud and manage tags can be done using the