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.

So you have this Drupal theme project you're working on, and you wonder where to start. This blog post tries to assist you in this endeavor. It assumes you're working with the default template engine: PHPTemplate.

First, let's zoom into how Drupal processes a theme. Most theme related information is stored in files in the theme directory. Usually, the my_theme theme files will reside in sites/all/themes/my_theme. An overview of typical files you will encounter in the theme directory:

Today I started mashing up the Acquia Slate theme with the Colourise theme and managed to port the Acquia slate implementation of taxonomy terms into Colourise. In addition I implemented a configurable theme registry rebuild flag and added a configurable taxonomy term separator into the theme:

As you may have seen in the past few weeks I have been trying out new layouts for my website. I moved from the Acquia Slate theme to the Colourise theme and customised it a bit.

Personally I'm starting to like this layout, I even tried to create some artwork

Drupal has literally hundreds of plugins (modules and themes) to choose from. After having set up quite some Drupal environments I start to find a couple Drupal administration modules particularly useful. Most are lightweight, and all are quite useful:

After a way too long hiatus (which was mainly due to a remodeling job that took longer and became more extensive than anticipated) I finally took the time to update the website engine (Drupal and assorted extra modules) to the most recent version. This should make it less vulnerable to external threats. Fortunately most spammers are already caught by Mollom, although I had to handle 2 uncaught spam comments in the past week.

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...