The small things that make life easier with Drupal
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.
A problem with the yet unreleased versions of Drupal 6 is that in some cases Drupal all of a sudden seems to lose all of its paths. In my case it happened when working on a port of an OSInet module from the Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 6 API.
A symptom of the problem can be seen by checking the menu_router table and finding it to be empty, although it should contain the default site navigation.
Drupal.org being unavailable quite frequently these days, some may find it hard to download the module of their choice.
Luckily, the downloads are static files served as public downloads outside Drupal itself: all it takes is knowing the proper URL, and they are all gathered on ftp://ftp.drupal.org/pub/drupal/files/projects, just waiting for your favorite FTP browser.
The google_gadget module is now available directly from my sandbox on drupal.org, at http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/contributions/sandbox/fgm/google_gadget/.
It should make it simpler to use than having to gather the pieces from my post explaining the module.
2009-05-24: UPDATE: now ported to D6
Having recently discovered the
Google Gadgets API, and being
on vacation this week proved too much of a temptation: I
had to build one using Drupal. Here is a way to do it,
as a module creating a Google Gadget to directly
search http://api.drupal.com/ from the
iGoogle home page.
User preferences allow searching the various versions of the API
and default to Drupal 5.
After almost six months without abuse following the installation of the captcha module, a spammer found its way through it, to promote a ringtones site.
Not that it did him/her much good, since comments are premoderated anyway, but still...
Sheer luck, of astute pattern matching and module workaround ? Oh well, it's still six months of peace gained. Well worth the almost nonexistent hassle, it seems.
The "heavy" modules OSInet contributes to Drupal (G2, Helpdesk, Zeitgeist) have now been placed under the new release system.
Branches and releases have been created where applicable:
A few days ago, it was brought to my attention that something had been broken on the PHP-GTK community site during the 5.0 RC2 upgrade. The problem was easily identified as being codefilter.module having been removed during the upgrade and not reinstalled. Of course, not being at my office, I did not have access to the FTP passwords, but just to my admin account, and I did not want to leave the community members in the cold, so I used this small trick.
The PHP-GTK community site has been running on Drupal 5 betas since its creation one month ago, and I thought it really needed a live chart of statistics to match its glorious Garland dress, and GD would allow it. But how does one go about creating charts within Drupal ?
.The new Garland / Minnelli theme (née Themetastic) from Drupal 5.0 is one of the main visible improvements over 4.7. However, not all sites are ready to make the jump to 5.0 as soon as it's ready, which should be very soon now, so why not use Garland on 4.7 ?