drupal administration

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).

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.

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:

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.