Technical Blog

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| 2 min read
NextGEN Gallery NextGEN Gallery Wordpress plugin is a fully integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option. Before I started writing the plugin I studied all the existing image and gallery plugins for WordPress. Some of them are really good and well designed, but the gap I filled was a simple administration system at the back end which can also handle multiple galleries.
Fix Certbot Auto-Renew Error in Ubuntu
| 2 min read
GTranslate GTranslate is a Wordpress plugin that provides an automatic translation service to translate your web page with Google power. With the ability to translate over 58 available languages your site will be available to more than 98% of Internet users. GTranslate for Drupal does the same thing in Drupal and has been coded by the same author.
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| 5 min read
Upgrading a Drupal site refers to moving it’s database and files from one major version of Drupal to a later one, to take advantage of the newer features and bug fixes that might not be available for the older version. Upgrading a Drupal site is a pretty effective way to make sure that your Drupal site is currently up to date with all the latest security updates and bug fixes. Old versions of Drupal will naturally be unsupported with the arrival of the new releases. The Drupal community has currently stopped supporting the older versions of Drupal like version 4 and 5 and has moved to Drupal 7. However Drupal 6 is more widely supported. Have a look at the steps required to upgrade your Drupal site from an older version to      Drupal 6.     
Fix Certbot Auto-Renew Error in Ubuntu
| 7 min read
By default, Drupal serves all its files publicly via http. This means that any unauthorized user can directly access all the files through a browser by entering its path. This is also true for files which have permissions for them. The solution provided by Drupal, which is to make the entire file system private is resource intensive and can bring down the server. However there is another less costly workaround to this issue. Read on to find out more.
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| 1 min read
What do you do when you want to delete multiple nodes from a drupal site? You go to admin » content and then delete nodes one by one? No. You go to PhpMyadmin and delete the nodes from the node table?. Absolutely not (don't even think about it). There are a few solutions. There is the Views Bulk Operations module. But there is an easy hack to do this or for that matter bulk node operations.
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| 2 min read
The Views module in Drupal provides a Feed display that will allow for site owners to publish the content on their sites as RSS feeds. However, unlike a page or block display, the feed display does not allow for addition of custom tags inside the feed using the Views administration UI. There is however a way to add custom tags, attributes and values into the generated feed using hook_nodeapi.
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| 3 min read
If you use drupal as a blogging platform you would want to auto tweet your new posts on to twitter. Twitter and Shorten module provides you with the basic framework required to do this and all you will need to get it working is to configure these modules. There is also a small patch that has to be applied to the twitter module (until the patch goes into the CVS) to allow the use of shortened URLs in the tweet.
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| 4 min read
Drupal allows very fine grained control over how content is presented to the end user. The presentation layer is abstracted beautifully and cleanly designed hooks allows for moving data from the logic layer to the presentation layer. The template file that handles the basic page layout of every drupal site is page.tpl.php and the different regions available for a given theme are all available as HTML elements in page.tpl.php. Another important template file is node.tpl.php which decides how nodes are presented to the end user.
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| 3 min read
Views is one of the most complex of all Drupal modules and one of the most useful of all Drupal modules. The only downside is that, since it is very complex, not too many people have been able to contribute to the documentation of the module. If you search Google for finding out how to programmatically set a filter in Views2 you probably wouldn't find any help. Here is how you do it.
Zyxware default image4
| 3 min read
Feed API provides a powerful means of importing feeds from other sites directly into your Drupal site. What if you want to export your feed as an XML file to a content distributor who wants it on his FTP site? There is of course the traditional approach of using curl to read your feed URL and dump the text as files on to the ftp site. There is not much control that you have over this process. However doing this via Drupal Views will give you fine grained control over the process
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| 3 min read
SEO requires you to have descriptive titles and URLs matching the title. But when you want to publish your URL some place where the length of the URL is an issue you definitely want short URLs. One solution to the problem is to use URL shortening services like tr.im to shorten the long URLs to short and sweet 9 character urls. But the URL will lose your sites identity. Don't worry there is the drupal way to solve this problem.