dtutorials

How to create URL aliases in Drupal without path module

Tim — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:28:35 +0000

Creating pretty urls or permanent links in Drupal is easy. Really easy. This functionality comes out of the box with the Path module. And by adding the contributed Pathauto module you can make your life easier by letting Drupal generate the pretty urls automatically based on some properties of your post (like the title).

But there's another way of doing this in Drupal. Drupal provides a mechanism in code by means of the custom_url_rewrite_inbound and custom_url_rewrite_outbound functions. Using these wisely may give you some performance gain. Let's see how you can use these.

Domain:

drupalcoder.com

Drupal 6 Performance Tips

Tim — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:47:20 +0000

Author:

Trevor James, TJ Holowaychuk

Publisher:

Packt Publishing

Short Description:

This book is written for Drupal beginners, developers, designers, and webmasters who utilize the Drupal content management system to create robust websites. It provides crucial performance-related information for users of all experience levels, including Drupal module contributors, webmasters who simply configure and maintain Drupal websites, and even Drupal themers.

Long Description:

Learn how to maximize and optimize your Drupal framework using Drupal 6 best practice performance solutions and tools

Monitor the performance of your Drupal website and improve it
Configure a Drupal multisite environment for best performance
Lot of examples with clear explanations
Choose and use the best Drupal modules for improving your site's performance

Drupal is one of the most respected and widely used open source content management frameworks. Small, medium, and large-scale websites are built using Drupal and the framework supports ecommerce, CRM, multisite and web service integrations.

Once you get your Drupal site installed and up and running, you will be concerned with site performance and how fast you can make your Drupal site run. This book will focus on implementing performance modules and solutions to help speed up your Drupal website.

We will look at introductory topics such as upgrading your Drupal site, maintaining your site, and enabling core Drupal page compression and caching.

Then we will turn to an advanced look at some contributed modules that help speed up performance, including Development, Boost, Authcache, Advanced Cache, and the Memcache API and Integration module.

Finally, we'll look at how best to implement a Drupal multisite environment and run it with high-speed performance in mind.

This book is designed for Drupal developers and webmasters who want to increase their Drupal site's speed and performance. You will take your Drupal site to the next level by not only displaying relevant and newsworthy content, but also running a powerful and high-speed website.

What you will learn from the Drupal 6 Performance Tips book

Upgrade your Drupal 5 site to Drupal 6 using best practice upgrade paths
Back up and maintain your Drupal 6 site using core and contributed modules and utilities
Configure the Drupal core and contributed modules for high traffic
Run core Drupal page compression, CSS and JS compression, and use Drupal page caching
Run scheduled cron tasks to perform crucial garbage-collection processes
Use the Development (Devel) module to monitor page loads and queries
Use the Boost module for anonymous page caching, tweak Boost settings, and use Boost blocks and advanced Boost settings to monitor site performance
Install and use Memcache API and Integration module, and Authcache and Advanced Cached modules to enhance and monitor site performance
Configure a Drupal multisite environment for best performance
Approach

This is a practical and solution-based book designed to help you to quickly discover and learn about specific aspects of Drupal performance that you are interested in. In each chapter, Drupal-based modular performance tips and solutions are investigated and explained in detail.

Who Drupal 6 Performance book is written for

This book expects basic knowledge of Drupal operation, configuration and server technologies, and applications including MySQL and PHP.

Book Store:

Amazon

Book Link:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1847195849?ie=UTF8&tag=timonwebcom-20&link_code=as3&camp=211189&creative=373489&creativeASIN=1847195849

Date published:

02/2010

Upgrading large & complex sites

Tim — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:14:00 +0000

The two main problems with upgrades are complexity and time: a lot of operations need to be performed in a specific order within a short period of time to minimize downtime. Any solution that addresses these two problems will need to be automated, and the best way to do this that I found involved a VCS, drush and some minimal shell scripting. The presentation is about the WHY's, and this article is about the HOW's, with more implementation details that wouldn't fit well in a presentation.

Domain:

happypixels.net

CVSing back your drupal site

Tim — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:07:02 +0000

The benefits of using source control are great. It is like working with another developer, to review your code changes, even if you are all by yourself, not to mention being able to rollback any changes that you have made.

The main idea is to download from cvs the same version of your existing site, then copy all the CVS folders in each subdirectory to the appropriate subdirectories of your existing site. Then to run compare with cvs any differences that you have made, and once satisfied, update using cvs to the latest version.

Domain:

coderamblings.com

Creating Custom Lists Using Nodequeue

Tim — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:00:51 +0000

The Nodequeue module is an incredibly useful module that allows you select individual nodes and place them in a list in whatever order you like. This lesson shows you how to create a new nodequeue, add nodes to the queue, arrange the queue and then add the queue to a view.

Embed Video Here:

Domain:

learnbythedrop.com

Add alternative search with the Lucene API module

zugec — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:43:50 +0000

The Search Lucene API module is an alternative search module which can be used on your Drupal site. It's powered by a stripped down version of the Zend Lucene Search which is a PHP port of Apache Lucene. Because it's all PHP do don't have to worry about running the search on a separate server or setup other applications to run the search.

Domain:

zugec.com

Multilingual Drupal: Some Dos And Don'ts

Tim — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 22:37:00 +0000

So we've done all French sites before. And we've done all English sites before. But a recent project was our first real forray in to multilingual sites and it's an e-commerce/Ubercart job! Talk about gluttons for punishment!

There are bags of tutorials, so I'll keep this short but sweet. A list of dos and don'ts from our painful, recent experience:

Domain:

co.uk

Advanced Drupal Theming using Panels Part 1

Tim — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 22:14:00 +0000

I generally would style individual page elements like menus, blocks, views, and other content by using their own class names or IDs. That would mean if I wanted a consistent style to be applied to many of these elements I would have to override template files just to add a consistent class attribute, or have multi-line selectors in my css which would make it incredibly difficult to organize. Then one day I got smart and started to use Panels. Without getting into much detail, I’d have to say that using Panels to create my own custom layouts and plugins has changed my game as a Drupal themer.

Domain:

activelamp.com

Creating a custom multi field search in Drupal Apache Solr

Tim — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:25:07 +0000

Say you have a property website and you wanted to offer users the ability to search on a number of different fields in a Solr index. At the moment in the Solr admin interface you have the ability to put content bias on a number of predefined fields. Whilst useful it doesn't give you very fine grained control.

Here is a possible option for creating a multiple field search handler in Drupal Apache Solr.

Domain:

uk.net

Using diff module

zugec — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:47:23 +0000

The diff module let's you view the difference between node revisions. It adds a tab on every node page where you can see a list of revisions which you can control via permissions.

Domain:

zugec.com