Drupal

If you want to easily update Drupal core, then this is right for you. This approach will first compare your deployed Drupal with the original Drupal source code to do a pre-update sanity check. Then the old Drupal files are deleted one by one, the empty directories as well, and then the new Drupal is deployed.

If you follow this approach, updating your Drupal core version should take you less than 5 minutes.

If you have no shell access to your hosting provider, you can still apply the approach described in this article if you have a mirror copy (a perfect replica) of the deployed Drupal server on a host you have shell access to. Apply the changes on the mirrored files on your local host (steps 1 to 5, skip step 6), then synchronize the changes with the webhost, and finally run update.php (step 7).

In a previous blog post I introduced the basics of how Drupal themes work. Let's dig a bit deeper and create our own sub-theme. What you need, is a working Drupal environment and at least one custom theme installed in sites/all/themes. During this tutorial I will create a sub-theme for the Colourise theme. If you want to use a different starting theme, the explanation below should still apply (apart from the name of the parent theme).

If you have your own Drupal site for a while, and you want to add or update the tags of your content, you have to edit every single node and update the tags by hand. This is a rather tedious job.

Fortunately you don't have to hack the Drupal database to tag your content en masse: the Views Tagger module leverages the Views module and provides a dedicated view to tag all your nodes at once.

Opening up a public website to allow people to comment is a risky endeavor nowadays. Vandalism and ‘blog spam’ can be very labor intensive to cure after an attack. Fortunately there are a couple products and services that help in fighting this Digital Evil through machine parsing.

One of Drupal's key success factors certainly is its huge collection of modules. However, the sheer number of developed modules does not ease your search for extra functionality. In addition, sometimes the same functionality is provided by more than one module. Probably you'll like DrupalModules.com: on this site you can conveniently search for modules, restrict your search to a specific Drupal major release, choose between similar modules based on reviews...

Although many hosting providers now offer hosting packages with PHP and MySQL, most do not offer cron functionality, i.e. the possibility to schedule tasks. The simplest way to set up these scheduled tasks within Drupal is by means of the Poor Man's cron Drupal module. Once installed it will check whether cron must be run whenever your Drupal site is visited.

Some Drupal themes provide their own menu system instead of Drupal's built-in primary links menu. When enabling these fancy menus, your Drupal site may end up with two menu systems instead of one. In order to get rid of the primary links menu, you need to disable it:

1. Log in with “administer menu” privileges.
2. Navigate to to administer » settings » menus (admin/settings/menu) and set ‘Menu containing primary links:’ to ‘No primary links’. Repeat for the secondary links.