Drupal tips and tricks

If the SELECT in your Drupal modules are suddenly all 4 lines high or more...

If all of a sudden you notice that the SELECT elements in your Drupal forms increases to 4 and any smaller size is ignored...

... maybe you've already forgotten you were using Chrome, and it is not a Drupal bug : this is a "usability" feature of WebKit. See http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/WebCore/rendering/RenderListBox.cpp#L67.

Safari users are probably used to it, but for users of other browsers, this is a bit disconcerting.

Reducing system load for graphical widgets

Using a graphics library, be GD, ImageMagick or anything else, is convenient, but carries a price to pay: unlike most Drupal parts, which are generally database-bound, image generation is typically CPU-bound: generating many images on the fly can significantly increase the CPU load on a system, while Drupal setups are typically not optimized for this, and could result in problems if you are using Drupal on a shared hosting account. So what ?

A graphical progress bar widget for FormsAPI

A graphical progress bar widget for Forms API In the previous post, we saw how to create a XHTML progress bar widget for Forms API, using theme_progress_bar. The next logical step is now to create a graphical equivalent to that progress bar, as an example for far more advanced fully graphical widgets made possible using a similar mechanism.

A progress bar widget for FormsAPI

Forms API progress bar As a Drupal user, you certainly noticed that update.php displays a nice progress bar to make you wait during its batch operations. And maybe you also noticed theme_progress_bar in the API reference.

The question

Wouldn't it be nice to have that progress bar available as an extended version of markup that would graphically display a value in your forms without stuffing it in a markup element ?

Checkboxes in forms step by step

For some reason or another, I've noticed several new Drupal developers these last few days sweating on Forms API, and thought it would be nice to have a smallish example to complement the unavoidable FAPI reference and Guick start guide, for a typical non-basic form: one including set of checkboxes in a table, with a customized display, like the core user, content or modules administration forms. So follow me while we build this example.

e-Commerce sessions in Szeged

If you are [considering] working on an e-Commerce site, and are coming to the Szeged Drupalcon, you may be interested in several sessions around the theme. In order for your session(s) of choice to stand a chance of being actually part of the conference program, you should vote for the sessions you would like to attend.

Subjet to approval by the conference board, I will be animating/presenting a session about the internals of the e-Commerce suite: see http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/program/sessions/developing-e-commerce for more details. If this is of interest to you, vote on the session to make sure it will indeed be included in the conference program.

Deprecating img_relocator

In summer 2006, I created the img_relocator module, which was published to my sandbox, and apparently picked up by some Drupal admins, although it was never promoted to full-fledged project status.

When e-commerce won't create products ...

I was working on an existing site today, and after installing the e-commerce 3.4 suite (EC), noticed something was very weird: product type modules were enabled, all basic EC modules were there too, and yet, when I created products by hand, the "Anonymous purchase" fieldset appeared, but nothing else from EC.

Worse, when saving the new products, they were properly created in the {node} table, but never appeared in the {ec_product} table, which caused them never to appear as products in the admin products list of the product view available to users. What could be going on ?

Multisite and dynamic configuration items in Drupal : help from Apache

Having recently merged a number of separately configured sites into a single consolidated multisite, I found myself with URLs like:

http://www.site1.com/sites/www.site1.com/files/somefile.png

...on all except the main site of the multisite configuration.

Although img_relocator allows me to just type things like:

<img src="somefile.png" />

... and still have these URLs be automagically generated, they still appear to those users who actually look at the URLs.

Enter mod_rewrite

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

With these sites running over Apache 2.x, mod_rewrite offers a simple way to rewrite the files URLs: in the Apache site definition file for the vhost describing the site, we can use:

Tracking the WSOD

At long last, I've moved the OSInet sites from shared hosting to a VDS over the 4-day Xmas period, and overall it went well.

However, with new users (dare I say bots ?) eager to refresh the site after a few hours offline, I soon had to stand about 20 hits/sec, which proved to be a bit too much on this small VDS. So I enlisted the help of APC, just like the drupal.org sysops do, and like I do on the group's intranet servers and it went really faster.

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