TimOnWeb

When you need a fashionable ‘carousel’-like module for your Drupal website I bet you will choose jCarousel module (http://drupal.org/project/jcarousel) to fulfill the need. But what if you want to change the default look provided by the module (in 99% of cases, everyone wants this) what will you do? “Tweak a theme css!” - young Drupal geek will say. “No! Make a custom skin for it!” - old Drupal expert will answer.

It's almost midnight in my area, but I couldn't resist sharing this cool theming tip with you. Ok, so you want to create a cool collapsible div to hide some content on your page. What would you do? Write another javascript/jquery snippet and mess with callbacks, toggles, etc?

Well, in Drupal this can be done even easier! Chaos tool suite (aka Ctools) comes to rescue! This module is a must have on any website, so don't worry about installing one more module to do a simple thing. And I'm 90% of you have it already installed.

Time from time, while developing websites with Drupal I encounter the problem of debugging email messages my site sends.

The common solution is to send test messages to your own mailbox to see how messages look like, debugging them this way. But this is not the most comfortable solution, moreover, it can become a nightmare debugging email on a localhost, especially on Windows, when you have to install local mail server, route all the stuff to localhost mailboxes and hassle with Mercury or some other thing...well in overall, it is not the most pleasant thing to do.

People are lazy by nature and love when something is done for them automatically. As web developers, we can always use this need in our website designs by creating different autocomplete fields to ease website visitor's experience. Being the best CMS platform outhere, Drupal allows us to create autocomplete fields within a blink of an eye. Here’s how to do this:

The task is very common, but in Drupal 7 you do this in a bit different way than in Drupal 6. Here’s how to remove format options from comments textarea in Drupal 7:

UPD: Well, the most easiest way to do this is to install Better Formats module (http://drupal.org/project/better_formats). But do we need another module installed to do this simple thing? Me, not, so let's dig into the code a bit.

Basically, we need to alter comment form. You can do this in two ways:

Almost a year ago I wrote a tutorial about How To Separate Drupal Taxonomy Terms Output By Vocabulary (which is the third most popular post on this blog to date!), the technique desribed in the tutorial was useful for Drupal 6, but not for Drupal 7. I got some requests to explain How To Separate Taxonomy Terms Output By Vocabulary in Drupal 7 and here it is. The explanation.

If you build a View with an exposed filter you may want to put this filter in a block. This is can be done to separate filter from view results and to display exposed filter in any part of your website.

To do this, go and edit your view.

It is so quick that I won't even publish an image with this post ;)

OK, I've recently switched to Wampserver for my dev box and noticed that it is somewhat slow with Drupal 7. Increasing the realpath_cache_size (this is to do with opening a lot of files) put things back to normal. Set realpath_cache_size = 2M in your php.ini file.

Enjoy and have a nice weekend (if you're reading this on Saturday / Sunday).

Just wanted to make a quick share on how to solve one weird Drupal 7 performance related problem.

Picture this. Yesterday, your Drupal 7 site run pretty ok, but today it as slow as a snail and you don't remember yourself changing anything. I myself encountered this problem today and spend a good hour looking for a problem source.

My problem was connected to a so-called "Avoid re-scanning module directory when multiple modules are missing" bug which is still not resolved. This problem happens if you have some missing modules in your Drupal installation. For example, you could delete or rename module while it's enabled (which happens often on a development machine).

The Solution

I've been busy with a migration work for my client recently. There is an established website built with some proprietary CMS with a decent amount of articles / pages, different categories and user comments. My team was hired to make a complete migration from this money-sucking old-fashioned proprietary CMS to a modern shiny open-source Drupal 7. I like this kind of tasks. It’s always a pleasure to help people get rid of an old and proprietary technologies.