DRUPAL-6

The Drupal Block system from drop.org to Drupal 8: video from DrupalCon Prague

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

So DrupalCon Prague is almost over, and I can now share with you the video of my session about the history of the Drupal block system, from drop.org to Drupal 8, just as recorded on wednesday.

The session page is available on https://prague2013.drupal.org/session/blocks-drop.org-drupal-8-and-beyo… where you can also rate it. Please to it over there, or add your comments here: it is very useful for me to see what needs to be adjusted for upcoming presentations. Based on the overall feedback, it seems that:

How to restore Unfuddle dumps: migrating to Drupal CaseTracker

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

Unfuddle is a very convenient and fairly cheap SaaS hosted Redmine (with extensions) and SVN/Git, which I use regularly on customer projects. Their service includes reassuring "Backup" options, going as far as to include the ability to backup to your own Amazon S3 bins in addition to their local backups.

Recently, however, I had to go back to an archived project for which I had dutifully taken a dump before closing it on Unfuddle, and looked for a way to restore it to my Unfuddle account. To no avail. Unfuddle support then kindly confirmed that the service did include a backup feature, but no restore:

Backups of projects within Unfuddle are for personal use only and cannot be restored into accounts via the interface. This however may be possible with some custom scripting on your part and with the use of our API (http://unfuddle.com/docs/api).
What then ?

What to do when you can no longer login to your Drupal site

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

So the scenario is this: you notice that you are no longer able to login on your Drupal site:

  • the {users} table entry for your account looks just fine
  • the login and access timestamps on your account are just a few seconds old, matching your latest attempt to login
  • you reset your password in the DB, just in case, and it still does not work
  • the telltale is that Drupal will not even tell you your login failed: it actually works, as the {users} table shows, but yet you are not logged in

Can you guess what can have been going wrong and fix it ?

Drupal as one of the key Internet Technologies

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

Received this Harris Interactive poll today, on behalf of Tarsus, the french company organizing the Solutions Linux expo.

One of the choices was a list of the top 30 Internet Technologies. And guess what ? For once, Drupal was on the list: first time I see it mentioned in this type of business context. Interesting.

Drupal among the top 30 internet technologies

Debug vanilla

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

Most of the time, when working on some piece of code, I'll resort to the configured debugger in my current Zend Studio configuration. And you probably do too :-)

However, I often have to access debug-type information on live sites where installing a debugger is out of the question, and I find myself often resorting to parameter dumps like the following:

<?php
// lazy version for simple cases
function foo_bar($x, $y, $z) {
 
dsm(func_get_args());
 
// [...]

// less lazy version for more hairy cases

function foo_baz($x, $y, $z) {
 
dsm(array('in foo_baz, x' => $x, 'y' => $y, 'z' => $z));
 
// ...
?>

You've probably being using it too and, of course, after the first few dozen times, it becomes a bit used. So here's a tiny snippet that makes such dumps simpler to type and use :

Easy mass deletions

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

Sometimes, you want to delete a whole bunch of users, terms, or nodes, say to cleanup a site while developing and still keep its configuration, so reinstalling is not really an option, and the normal content- or user-administration pages get in your way because they only show a limited number of entries, meaning you have to delete page after page of entries.

Views in Paris

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

In case you've been living under a rock, DrupalCon Paris is happening next week, and features, not one, but two Views Sessions, in addition to merlinofchaos' own CTools sessions on Panels 3 and CTools. One of them being, of course, by yours truly :-)