The Web Developer's Blog

Exclude all nodes of a Drupal node type from the search results

rob — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 08:49:21 +0000

Here's an easy way to entirely exclude all nodes of a certain type from your search results using hook_db_rewrite_sql. Simply create a Drupal module containing the following snippet, and change the $excluded_content_types array to contain the content types you wish to exclude:

Specify an alternative jQuery library for a particular page on your Drupal site

rob — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 13:13:09 +0000

Drupal 5.x comes bundled with a fairly outdated version of the jQuery library. Simply downloading the latest version of jQuery and replacing Drupal's jQuery library is not recommended, as this causes compatibility problems with Drupal's own use of jQuery.

Nevertheless, there are times when you might have a requirement to use the latest version of jQuery. For instance, you might want to make use of a jQuery plugin that's not supported by the default version.

Use Mod Rewrite to redirect visitors requesting a specific host to a new host

rob — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:31:49 +0000

To redirect visitors requesting a specific host name to a whole new host name, use the following snippet in your .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?oldhost\.com$ 
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newhost.com/$1 [R,L]
</IfModule>

This will check for visitors requesting either oldhost.com or www.oldhost.com and redirect them to www.newhost.com.

Give your Drupal blocks a more descriptive HTML ID attribute

rob — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:08:22 +0000

I don't know about you, but I like my HTML ID attributes and therefore my CSS selectors to be descriptive. It makes both my HTML and CSS more readable, and lets me scan a document more effectively, locating the section I need with relative ease.

If you create a custom Drupal block the system will typically output a line of HTML which might look like this:

Restrict access to Drupal nodes, node types and menu items

rob — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:44:08 +0000

If you want to restrict access to certain pages, or all pages of a certain type, on your Drupal website, I recommend the Content Access module. Unfortunately, the Content Access module fails to hide the menu item of a restricted page.

Showing the nested sub-navigation of the active primary link

rob — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:27:14 +0000

This seems obvious, yet every time I start a new Drupal project I spend at least 10 minutes looking at older projects trying to find the solution.

I'm talking about getting Drupal to show the sub-navigation of a primary link when that primary link is active.

The solution is so simple it invariably leads to a facepalm: Instead of using the provided $primary_links variable in your template, enable the primary links block on the block configuration page.

Why can't I remember this?

Add tertiary links to your Drupal template

rob — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:37:22 +0000

By default, Drupal gives you two menu variables to use in your templates. $primary_links contains the first level of navigation and $secondary_links contains the child pages of the active primary link.

But what if you need to display the children of the secondary links? Fortunately, Drupal user rapidsynergy has done the hard work for us in this comment he posted on the Drupal website. I'll reproduce his code here (with slight modifications) for future reference.

How to find latitude and longitude coordinates for a Google Maps location

rob — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:27:33 +0000

Lifehacker came to my rescue this afternoon, showing me a dead easy way to find the latitude and longitude coordinates for any Google Maps location.

Read How to find latitude and longitude.

Disable TinyMCE on a per-field basis in Drupal

rob — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:22:16 +0000

There's a post on avocadoshake.net, which describes how to disable TinyMCE on a per field basis in Drupal.

Read How to disable TinyMCE per fields in Drupal.

Instruct the Views module to add class values to each item of a list view

rob — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:05:46 +0000

I had a client ask me recently to help them identify the first and last nodes of a list view by adding a class to each of the list items.

This can be done pretty easily by overriding the appropriate views theme function and injecting some of our own code into the array of rendered nodes just before they are converted to a list and displayed.

Simply paste the snippet below into the file named template.php residing in your theme's folder. If there's no template.php, go ahead and create it.