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The articles on this page are ComputerMinds' contribution to the Planet Drupal aggregated article feed.  Planet Drupal is intended to collate interesting and useful Drupal content from around the web.

Article
Posted on 29th March 2011
Takes about 2 mins to read

[Aegir][aegir] is a very clever hosting system for [Drupal][drupal] that sites and provisions them on various servers and does lots of clever things. One of the clever things that it has had for a while is a task queuing system. You can ask Aegir to lots of different things all in one go, and Aegir will queue them up and run them at its own pace. This provides a really good separation from the front-end...

Article
Posted on 25th March 2011
Takes about 1 min to read

Here's a quick post that will be a reminder for us as much as anyone else! Setting the default theme during installation using an installation profile is surprisingly hard in Drupal 6, and easier though not obvious in Drupal 7. In Drupal 6, we used the wonderful Install Profile API module, which allowed us to do it in just a few lines in an install task: install_enable_theme(array('my_theme', 'garland', 'rubik')); install_default_theme('my_theme'); install_admin_theme('rubik'); In Drupal 7, here's...

Article
Posted on 18th March 2011
Takes about 1 min to read

I made a new Drupal 7 module today... the CTools Path Access plugin. It is a very simple module that provides a CTools access plugin for using the access rules of another path. For example, you might set up a custom Panels search page in Page Manager, and just want to use the same access rules that the default Drupal search page uses at /search. I have submitted the plugin as a patch for CTools...

Article
Posted on 16th March 2011
Takes about 2 mins to read

While at Drupalcon I couldn't help but want to get involved in core development of Drupal. I have been involved on the fringe of Drupal core development for a number of years, and I've found bugs, submitted patches, tested others' patches, fixed others' patches and contributed documentation, but to get really involved in development you have to basically immerse yourself in it. It's really hard to follow the issue queues and get any sense of...

Published in: #Drupal core #Drupal Planet
Article
Posted on 11th March 2011
Takes about 4 mins to read

Boosting terms in Solr search results produced by the Apache Solr Search module that integrates Solr with Drupal is something we had to do for a project recently. If a user has come to our website from a search engine, we can pick up the terms that they had originally searched for - and then boost any documents containing those terms in our own search pages, regardless of what they search for on our pages...

Published in: #Drupal #search #solr #Drupal Planet #Drupal 7
Article
Posted on 10th February 2011
Takes about 2 mins to read

We've been using Display Suite with Node displays on one of our latest sites. It was an experiment, and possibly not something we'll do again - DS offers some great functionality with build modes and ways to re-arrange fields and all sorts on nodes, but since we end up theming most nodes quite a lot anyway, it's not worth the extra hassle that Display Suite can add when you want to change the theming on...

Article
Posted on 7th February 2011
Takes about 3 mins to read

These three tools ([drush make][drush_make], [Aegir][aegir] and [Dropbox][dropbox]) have come together to produce a release system that means I don't have to ssh into a remote server to deploy a new version of site. This means that I can do releases really, really simply, and actually with nothing more than a web browser[^1]. Let me explain: ### Drush make If you aren't using [Drush make][drush_make], then you should look into it. Essentially you specify a...

Article
Posted on 3rd February 2011
Takes about 1 min to read

Drupal 7 heralds the end of the throttle module. It has been around since Drupal 4.6.x and as of November 22, 2008 was extinguished from Drupal 7.

Published in: #Drupal Planet #throttle
Article
Posted on 3rd February 2011
Takes about 2 mins to read

Creating extra field formatters in Drupal 7 is fairly simple, but it can take some poking around in the new Fields code. So here is some sample code to make it easier for you! You can add formats to your own fields -- or existing fields that are defined by other Drupal modules. This is the case for the following example - a formatter for a link field to display the URL as an absolute...

Article
Posted on 28th January 2011
Takes about 2 mins to read

When building forms, you will often want to only provide certain options if other options are chosen by a user. For example, there's no need to show the 'open link in new window' checkbox, if the 'make this into a link' checkbox hasn't been ticked. These kinds of dynamic forms haven't been easily available for Drupal... until now, with the #states for form elements in Drupal 7. Take a peek at this example of dynamic...