mauricemengel.de - Drupal

Remote Drupal Admin

Maurice — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:35:05 +0000

I have too many drupal sites now and updating modules etc (i.e. standard tasks) start to get annoying. I wonder if there are already tools to control drupal remotely and if I should write some small scripts using WWW::Mechanize or something else.

Also, I wonder if I should write web tests for the drupal sites I am developing.

This is just an idea. Here are some links I find helpful:

What would be easy?

test if site is up
execute update.php, cron.php
report/show drupal error messages

Drupal Taxonomy Menus

Maurice — Fri, 15 May 2009 17:16:17 +0000

puh. I think this was the third attempt I tried to fix this problem. Finally, it seems to work. As so often, the problem seems usual enough and one sometimes wonders that Drupal is not better with these very common things. But, let's be more concrete.

I have a site where I want to display news. News are classified in various categories using taxonomy terms. Now, I want these categories to appear in the menu and the menu items active when I see the posts. Just common-sense functionality, one would think.

I am sure there are different ways how to accomplish this with Drupal, but menu trails does NOT work. I ended up using taxonomy menu for part of the job. Since recently, this nice module populates the-menu-of-your-choice, but does not hamper anymore with the activity. (If I got it right, about the module history). Actually, that's fine and almost works on its own.

I make a new vocabulary for my news categories. (It still sucks that I cannot move my terms from one taxonomy to another, but this is not my topic here.) I add this vocabulary to my primary menu. Fine. In primary I have the vocabulary, in secondary the next level with the categories, like this

News

-my project news

-other projects

-site news

If I click on "News", the resulting page has News active. Right!

If I click on "other projects", the resulting page has "other projects" active. Right!

If I click on a specific posting with this taxonomy term, there is nothing active. NOT GOOD!

Googling brings me to menu trails. If have tried that before. I think, it works only for less levels menu. I finally find "Node breadcumb" and that saves my day. With it you can set up simple rules. I link the taxonomy term "news" with my menu item of the same name. I have to do it for all terms, but not for all posts! So only three times for my example. And I am done! Works intuitively.

Now, I should think that is could be done programmatically, but I don't need this right now!

http://drupal.org/project/node_breadcrumb

Pixture Reloaded

Maurice — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 01:57:40 +0000

Pixture Reloaded

Maurice — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 21:28:58 +0000

Pixture ReloadedHm. I liked Pixture from my first day with drupal. Lately, I had a look at the updated version of Pixture Reloaded. It comes with an optional DHTML menu since recently. Not too bad. But several things bug me, so in this blog, I try to document the changes I make at the theme, so that I could make them again if I have, too ;-). 1. I want the dynamic menu to look more the original one (bold writing). 2. I want secondary links that are independent 3. I more 3d effect on the superfish menu. I mean darker areas tend to look lower, while lighter areas look higher. That's it so far

Marinelli Theme

Maurice — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 20:43:27 +0000

Marinelli New Secondary Links: Marinelli new secondary linksI really like the Marinelli theme by Matteo Leoni. I intend to use it for the new ESEM site. I has few issues with text, that it is not very Drupal compliant.

Also, I think I will need to define some styles to make working with the WYSIWYG editor easier. I need

real blockquotes that I can use for quotes.
I also need some headlines. I think there are some defined in typography.css, but I don't think Matteo Leoni is using them much on his signalkuppe.com

Well, my biggest problem with that theme so far are the secondary links. I don't like the organge color and I think they are too obvious. I would like to have them more decent at the top right. IAnd smaller. Less obstrusive. I guess, I have bluemarine in mind.

So maybe I should start with understanding how the page is split up in "blocks" (or however you wanna call it).

In order to get this change, I needed to change

graphics.css
layout.css
links.css
page.tpl.php
typography.css

I cannot really say that I understand .css or that I would even like it, but it seems to work. I try to attach those files so, I can redo them again when Mateo decides to update his theme...

Oh, I forgot to change links.css. I want them underlined and the need a hover effect. Let's see, maybe I can still do it, but I won't make a new screenshot.

Attachment	Size
marinelli-changes20081206.zip	10.49 KB

Drupal migrated

Maurice — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 06:55:25 +0000

Another personal drupal milestone: For the first time, I migrated a drupal site from one provider to another in real-life circumstances. By the way, I transferred from a multi-site to a single site with absolutely no database problem. Drupal seems to be quite robust.

By far the biggest problem was that the new provider doteasy.com has php register_globals on by default. I had to write them an e-mail so that they turn off that option. It was completely impossible to change any local setting. But they reacted pretty fast, so problem solved.

The other problem was the slow upload. It lasted hours to upload 10 MB of drupal modules. I guess the speed doesn't get better with me being in Germany and doteasy.com beeing based in the US.

The upside of all this is that doteasy have a newer php Version (5.x) than old site, so I could try some new modules that require new php which kills more valuable time...

Drupal Mirror Plans

Maurice — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 10:14:07 +0000

I recently set up a simple backup script that downloads my Drupal site and backs it up. The result is a zipped file that I hardly ever look at. Now for backup, but also for testing, it would be much nicer to have a script that mirrors my site as it is this moment to an active environment on localhost. Then you can check if the backup worked and you can easily start experimenting with new stuff (modules) without exposing your production server to any risk.

To get a simple version of this functionality, what were the steps to get this running?

use a Drupal module to backup the DB,
then download the whole site (including DB backup) into a local folder on localhost,
install the DB to the local host and
change this or that in settings.php and .htaccess to make it work.

In my case I use very different versions of Apache and PHP, this - of course - might lead to different behavior of my two sites, but that's not what I am concerned here.

I think, I will write this in perl next time I have some time. I might use wget to make it work fast and later switch to LWP.

I am surprised that there are not more activities in the Drupal community aimed at making the creation of mirrors easier.

Marinelli Strange Text

Maurice — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 13:25:49 +0000

Drupal Theming

Maurice — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 13:20:46 +0000

So todayMarinelli Strange Text I battled with theming for the first time. I like the Marinelli theme, but the text behaves unlike standard Drupal themes, so I decided to make that more conform to Drupal standards. Attached is the result. I changed the ul and ol li as well as blockquote. Currently, Marinelli tends to display text a little awkward by default.

I also tried various wysiwyg editors, but since the wysiwyg-module doesn't upgrade, the TinyMCE seems to remain the best. At least If you know how to configure that already.

Concerning the filtering, I decided that I want to stick with the HTML filter, so presently I use this config: <a><br><blockquote><cite> <code><div><dd><dl><dt><em><hr><img><li><ol><p><strong><ul>

Update:Of, course without span. That was a mistake.

Attachment	Size
typography.css	7.06 KB

More modules

mokko — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:03:59 +0000

More modules...

I seem to need taxonomy menu (http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_menu), possibly with DHTML (http://drupal.org/project/dhtml_menu) to make my idea of using a vocabulary for navigation to work. I will give it a try.

Also found a nice site dedicated to drupal modules:

http://drupalmodules.com

New trouble with Drupal Input format

Also I still try to understand drupal basics such as what a page and blog are good for. So today I noticed that for a list of my presentations that I made and that I will update a blog seems not very suitable. Also I noted that tinyMCE doesnt solve all of my problems. I changed the input format so that it accepts p-Tags and a couple of others, but I need to think about it more closely.