Planet Drupal

A little while ago I blogged about views content cache as a way to increase performance of your Drupal site. Today I released version 2.2 of the module, that adds lots of lovely features. The module has basically been re-written by Young Hahn from Development seed to provide a plugable mechanism for exposing cache segments. This means that any contrib module can contribute to keeping track of the what content has changed on the site...

Quite often you need to redirect a particular path on a Drupal site, there are a number of ways to do this, but most involve writing PHP code. Also, it's not hugely easy to do things like redirect node/%node but only when %node is a 'image' node, posted on a Tuesday. The awesome Page manager module, and a little utility module we wrote changes that. Page manager redirect Drupal module exposes a 'task handler' to...

Views is awesome. You get a ton of flexibility and power, but that comes at a price: Some of the queries that views produces are less than optimal, and the rendering of results can take a long time. Views 2.6 introduced a nice solution to some of the issues, with the introduction of caching plugins. Views itself comes with a single cache plugin (okay, okay two if you're really counting) that is time-based. So you...

Computerminds were due to attend the latest DrupalCon over in San Francisco, however Eyjafjallajokull had other ideas. With planes grounded and Europe at a standstill (in the air) we couldn't make it. However, an amazing bunch of people came together a couple of days before the start of Drupalcon proper to set up: DrupalVolCon London. DrupalVolCon was really cool, we watched the drupalcon keynotes from SF on a projector, and ate lots of pizza. We...

If you need to perform the same repetitive task on a bunch of nodes you can script the operation using PHP, but sometimes it can take a long time to write and test the PHP and even then you have to get the script to the server and execute within a certain time etc. Instead, you could use the testing tool Selenium. Selenium Remote Control can be invoked from a language such as PHP so...

Nodequeues are a really useful way of building ordered lists of content and they integrate amazingly with views and have quite a nice interface for adding/removing nodes. Out of the box you can create queues and choose node types that can be added to the queues, and roles that can manipulate the queues, with a little more effort and some code you can do a lot more. We had built a media competition feature for...

We've recently set up a Hudson Continuous Integration build server to help us with testing our sites. We got selenium up and running fairly quickly, it installs and tests all the sites and Hudson has aplugin to report the results from selenium tests. But we also wanted to run simpletests and report those results too. This article explains how I've set it up on our server, and will hopefully give you a head start on...

We're not sure what to do with these: we've written two simple Drush scripts for exporting content types and views. Saving us from having to navigate a few pages and precious seconds. Download them and pop them somewhere Drush can find them, a good candidate would be in ~/.drush Then you can run them by typing: drush export view <view_name> or drush export content type <type_name> You should now either have an error message or...

We are loving the Drupal context module here at ComputerMinds, it puts a lovely user friendly formal front end onto creating context's for your site, something we had previously been doing with various snippets of code. If you haven't come accross the context module before then I fully recommend you have a look at this post http://www.developmentseed.org/blog/2008/apr/09/context-ui which explains all ... Taxonomy based context The one key element that seems to be missing from context...

With large Drupal projects, especially those in their post-live phase, good code and release managment becomes vital. Update hooks provide the mechanism by which database changes can be scripted and deployed to the live server, this article assumes you are already well versed with the ways of update hooks. The two main problems we have with update hooks occur on multi developer projects Same function is implemented in 2 branches. Imagine the situation where you...