Snorkers

Install Drupal Remotely with SSH & Drush

2012-02-09T14:30:00.000Z

Connect to your server with SSH (using OSX Terminal, or Putty on Windows):
ssh <username>@<site address>
See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Shell for some background on SSH.
In your server root directory - preferably not the 'Public HTML' directory, WGET the Drush tarball of the latest release:
wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drush-7.x-4.5.tar.gz
Use TAR to extract and de-compress the archive, eg:
tar xzvf drush-7.x-4.5.tar.gz
Set up an alias to Drush
alias drush='/myserverroot/home/drush/drush'
Change working directory to Public HTML root of server
Download the Drupal code
drush dl drupal
Move the download 'up' one level:
mv drupal/* . mv drupal/.htaccess . rm –r drupal
Create a MySQL database (you may need to do this via your host's control panel)
mysqladmin –u [db_user] –p create [db_name]
Install the Drupal site
drush site-install standard --account-name=admin --account-pass=[useruser_pass] --db-url=mysql://[db_user]:[db_pass]@localhost/[db_name]
Fame and glory await

Only snag I've had with some hosts is providing enough resources for PHP/Drush to execute commands: 'Out of memory' a common problem, especially on shared hosting which may have relatively low memory. 256MB seems to be the minimum you can get away with to allocate to PHP [for Drupal/Drush] to run, so make sure when you purchase a hosting package, that you can have enough memory to play with.

Steve Jobs RIP

2011-10-06T10:08:00.002+01:00

Inspirational Stuff

Create a Drupal Module Patch With Git

2011-09-13T13:58:00.001+01:00

I thought I'd written my last bit of code over 10 years ago, but here I am struggling with all this new-fangled technology and inevitably tweaking module code that makes up the great Drupal open source empire.
A quick way to generate a patch for a module you want to tweak is using Drush and Git.

1. Download the module to your test environment with Drush. FFS don't do code development on a live site - kittens will die and you might (quite rightly) lose your job.
drush dl [module-name]

2. Navigate to directory and initialize an empty repository
cd [module-name]
git init

3. Add the files to new repository
git add *

4. Commit the files to the repository
git commit -m 'Initial commit'

5. Make changes to the file(s) you want to change within the module's directory.

6. Create patch - do this BEFORE committing changes
git diff —no-prefix > patchfile.patch

7. Optionally commit your latest changes to Git
git commit -m 'Description of what you've changed'

Save the patch, submit it on an issue queue, set the issue status to 'Needs review' and hope that some kind person reviews it so it can be committed as a permanent feature. Fame and glory awaits.

This is taken from a post by the awesome Swedish Chef dudes at Node One. http://nodeone.se/blogg/how-to-create-a-patch-for-a-drupal-module. They talk about commits against core/contrib HEAD: not really my bag, but ignore the comments about CVS (CVS must die, etc).

Charging Battery on a Touareg

2011-06-27T09:13:00.000+01:00

Children playing in the car, forgetful spouse... who knows. Flat battery this morning in the beast known as a VW Touareg. Automatic transmission, so no chance of bump starting this 2 tonne monster either.

A quick search of the manuals to find the battery killed off my first thought - whip it out and re-charge it. Alas it's 'very complicated and must be handled by specialist personnel'. Even my engineering prowess baulked at trying to remove it (it's under passenger seat BTW). So gave up for a while and generally pondered life.

However, VW have placed some funky little terminals in the engine bay (nearside) so you can charge it in situ. Red clip goes on the terminal under the little red cover (to left of photo); black clip goes on to the earthing stud (to the right of photo), which has a convenient lightning symbol etched onto it.

Leave it for a few hours with a meaty charger, and life is back to it's fuel-guzzling, carbon-producing self. Would be easier if a nice publisher, such as Haynes, produced a workshop manual for this. Serves us right, I suppose for buying such a large vehicle, but a necessary evil, alas.

Downloading Massive Files with a Mac

2011-06-26T20:50:00.000+01:00

Damn that slow broadband. I needed to download the latest version of the Apple Developer's iOS toolkit. A whopper at 4.1GB. The best I've ever got from my ISP is about 0.7M. I thought I'd click on the HTTP download link and leave it running overnight. Next morning: dismal failure at about 3GB, so no DMG file downloaded :(.

Inspired by this post, I had a go at WGETing the file instead, which should be a faster download, and automatically accommodate errors/breaks in net connection... but I had a few hurdles to clear:

OSX 10.6 doesn't have wget installed. I had previously installed the wonderful Homebrew package manager, and allowed me to install wget with brew install wget. Please note that you do need a version of the OSX Developer's Tools (ie, the one on your OSX install disc) prior to installing Homebrew. Worth installing Homebrew, just to make your future life much easier.
To use wget for the SDK download, you need to indicate to Apple that you have a Developer's account. To grab the cookie, install Firefox's cookie exporter, log in to the the Apple Developer site and export (save) your cookies.txt file.
Navigate via Terminal to the directory you saved cookies.txt, then run the following:
wget --cookies=on --load-cookies=cookies.txt --keep-session-cookies --save-cookies=cookies.txt https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/download.action?path=/Developer_Tools/xcode_3.2.6_and_ios_sdk_4.3__final/xcode_3.2.6_and_ios_sdk_4.3.dmg --2011-06-22 19:09:30-- https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/download.action?path=/Developer_Tools/xcode_3.2.6_and_ios_sdk_4.3__final/xcode_3.2.6_and_ios_sdk_4.3.dmg
Sit back and make a few cups of tea, or strip your car engine, go for a long walk. Took about 5 hours, despite the download being interrupted twice. The SDK downloaded just fine and now I have the newer SDK and XCode tools installed.

Yahoo IMAP in Outlook 2011

2010-11-17T11:12:00.002Z

Just getting to grips with Outlook for Mac. Also discovered how to set up Outlook with Yahoo Mail using IMAP. Not sure if it makes a difference but I'm using the paid Yahoo mail service.

Tools > Accounts

Add new mail account - enter [from/reply to] email address and password and clear the 'Configure automatically'

Server info

User name (without the @yahoo.com bit)
Password (should be from initial dialogue)
Incoming server: imap.mail.yahoo.com and check the Use SSL (should default to Port 993)
Outgoing server: smtp.mail.yahoo.com and check Override default port and Use SSL; set port to 465

That should be it, although to keep everyone happy, you might want to confirm your account name/password under outgoing server's 'More options'.

I actually have my email address set to something else (a 'lifetime' email forwarding alias) and Yahoo seems pretty happy with that - although that's probably another benefit of paying to use the service.

Coding Drupal in Dreamweaver CS5

2010-07-01T23:29:00.000+01:00

I've used big IDEs in the past: all the Drupal gurus/ninjas/whatever use Eclipse, Netbeans or something way over the top. My big project programming days are well and truly over - kicked the arse out of it over the years in BASIC, Pascal, FORTRAN, CORAL, ADA, Java and C++. When I started using Drupal to build websites, my aim was to avoid touching its underlying language, PHP. Managed that for 2 years, but recently have had to geek out to do a few cheeky things, either in the theming layer or some simple modules. My knowledge of PHP, jQuery and the Drupal API is pretty minimal, so need the following to write code:

Code hints (for PHP, jQuery and the Drupal API)
Code colouring (keep life simple)
Basic syntax checking (not debugging)
Integrated FTP and version control client.

Tried Smultron and TextMate, which are great, but can be a bit limited. With the relaunch of Adobe's Dreamweaver (version CS5) all of the above is now possible, with a load more CMS goodies (see http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver - and there's an intro on lynda.com too). OK, you only get SVN support and no Git, but everything else on my list now works well.

Here's how to set up Dreamweaver:

Find the Dreamweaver configuration files, MMDocumentTypes.xml (on OSX at /Applications/Adobe Dreamweaver CS5/Configuration/DocumentTypes) and Extensions.txt (on OSX at /Applications/Adobe Dreamweaver CS5/Configuration).
In MMDocumentTypes.xml add file extensions to the PHP section (you'll need to scroll through the XML to find it):

<documenttype file="Default.php" id="PHP_MySQL" internaltype="Dynamic" macfileextension="php,php3,php4,php5,theme,module,engine,inc" servermodel="PHP MySQL" winfileextension="php,php3,php4,php5,theme,module,engine,inc" writebyteordermark="false"> </documenttype>
In Extensions.txt change the line ending in : All Documents to include MODULE,THEME,ENGINE,INFO,INC,INSTALL and the line ending in : PHP Files and append the following extensions MODULE,INC,THEME,INSTALL
Open Dreamweaver and edit your preferences:

Code format: indent with 2 spaces; Tab size to 2
File Types/Editors - open .module, .theme, .engine, .info, .inc, .install in code view (add to the list of existing extensions)

Create your site locally and set up in Dreamweaver (Site > Manage sites). Then open any page and it should recognize it's part of a bigger thing.... so go to Site > Site-Specific Code Hints and set the 'Structure' to Drupal. Use the same process to add specific libraries (see following video)

Err... that's it

Theming Drupal [Node] Links

2010-05-25T19:28:00.000+01:00

I spent ages trawling the internet trying to find easy ways to change the little links that Drupal attaches to each node ('Add new comment') and either remove them, change them to icons or shuffle the order. Options available include:

Write a custom helper module that implements hook_link_alter()
Make the changes inside the theme's template.php preprocess_node
Overwrite the li a attribute with CSS

Option #1 just didn't work for me - it kept outputting the updated links in both the links ($links) and the categories ($terms).Option #3 was just bad. So I settled on #2:

I wanted to create custom icons (rather than text) and remove a few links generated by the Feed API module; I also was using the Add this module and wanted that to be the last link at the bottom of the page. So created some nice icons (I used the wonderful FamFamFam Silk icons and a few custom drawn ones) and added them to the /images directory of my theme. I then edited the template.php file in my theme and added the following function:


function mytheme_preprocess_node(&$variables) {
    $patheme = drupal_get_path('theme','mytheme');
    $links = $variables['node']->links;
    global $user;
    
    //Repeat following for each $links item you wish to change
    if($links['comment_add']){
      $links['comment_add']['title'] = theme('image', $patheme.'/images/comments_add.png', t('Add a comment'),t('Add a comment'));
      $links['comment_add']['html'] = true;
    }
    
    //Remove link example: removes link to 'Original Feed' (Feed API)
    unset($links['feedapi_feed']);
    
    //Removes 'Login to post comments' link for anon users
    if (!$user->uid) {
      unset($links['comment_forbidden']);
    }
    
    //Simple way to affect order that links are rendered
    //Move addthis to end of $links
    if( isset($links['addthis']) ) {
      $addthis = $links['addthis'];
      unset($links['addthis']);
      $links = array_merge($links, array('addthis' => $addthis));
    }

    //Reset node template links
    $variables['links'] = theme_links($links, array('class' => 'links'));
}

And you should obviously customize accordingly. There's a little more explanation in 'Front End Drupal' (Hogbin/Kafer - Prentice Hall 2009) pp163-165 which I highly recommend. I was also using the Print module and there is advice on customizing the module's icons at http://drupal.org/node/190173#themeicon.

And this is the end result (Left to right: Add new comment, print-friendly view and 'Add This' button).

Creating a Custom 404 (Page Not Found) Page in Drupal

2010-04-06T03:38:00.000+01:00

In the event of an HTTP 404 error ("Page not found") this PHP snippet will render a site search form, but will take keywords from the user's erroneous URL and prepopulate.

Create a new node (node/add/page), and ensure you can enter PHP code in your page body (check input filters).

Insert the following code into the body of your new page:


<p>I'm sorry the page you are looking for cannot be found.</p>
<div id="error-search-box">
<?php
// check that the search module exists and the user has permission to hit the form
if (module_exists('search') && user_access('search content')) {
$path = $_REQUEST['destination'];
$keys = strtolower(preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9-]+/', ' ', $path));
print drupal_get_form('search_form', NULL, $keys, 'node', 'Search this site');
}
?>
</div>

Save this new page (ideally with a custom URL of your choice: such as /page-not-found) and tweak your CSS accordingly.

So that Drupal will send users there when HTTP 404 errors are generated, go to admin > settings > error reporting (/admin/settings/error-reporting), and set the default 404 error page to page-not-found (or whatever). (You might want to do a 403 error page while you're here too).

If the above phases you out, as with all problems Drupal, there's a module for that... the thrifty404 module will do exactly the above, but you'll need to do a bit of cunningness in the Drupal theming layer to customize it.

And Bob's your aunty's live-in lover..!

Drupal/Drush on Windows

2009-11-02T19:10:00.000Z

Spent the past 3 years getting very comfortable using a Mac/Unix environment, but have mainly been using a Windows Server at work for hosting my sites. Now striving to reach Drupal ninja status, thought it was time to use Drush on the Windows [2003] server instead of just my DEV machines.

Pretty easy to get the basics of Drush running, although kept getting these annoying 'Cannot find module (IP-MIB): At line 0 in (none)' errors in every command being executed on the MS-DOS CLI... Bit of Googling found that this is a PHP error because the MIB files need to be on every Windows drive that you are executing PHP scripts. Even though my main website directories are on the D: drive, Drush is on my C: drive.

So, solution is to find the \USR folder, then copy \USR\mibs to the root of each drive you want to execute Drush (or, indeed, any PHP scripts) from. If you know tons about PHP (and I don't) you can probably disable the offending PHP extensions in php.ini - but in my case 'it ain't broke' so I'm going to leave as much of my PHP configuration alone as possible.

Mac/Parallels Kernel Issues after upgrade to OSX10.5.7

2009-05-21T17:12:00.000+01:00

I don't know if anyone else got this problem, but I recently upgraded Parallels then a few days later installed the latest OSX update to 10.5.7. After that whenever Parallels was opened received the error:


Are you sure you want to start the virtual machine?
One or more kernel components loaded on your Mac are for another version of Parallels Desktop. If you start the virtual machine now, it may work incorrectly. To solve this problem, restart your Mac. If the problem persists, reinstall Parallels Desktop.

Although I could proceed, Shared Networking stopped working, and Windows/Vista crashed a few times. Searching around, found a sweet application to clean the duplicate kernel entries - published by Parallels. Worked fine for me - although note it requires a Mac OS reboot. I did not need to re-install parallels

http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v4/en_us/parallels/update2/Cleanup-Kernel-Extensions.app.zip

GoDaddy Hosting and FTP with Dreamweaver

2009-04-29T05:49:00.000+01:00

Just a quick online snippet as this took me ages to sort out.
If you have Dreamweaver and wish to use FTP to transfer your files, use the following settings in Preferences > Sites > Manage Sites > Edit > Remote Info

Access: FTP
FTP Host: yourdomain.com (no ftp:// or www prefix please)
Host directory: subdomain/ (ie, the folder you have your subdomain within)
Login: GoDaddy Primary FTP user name (or other user name if you set that up)
Password: doh!

And on a Mac, I selected Passive FTP (on advice of this article)

And, as they say in Paris: 'C'est la blaireau!'

THAT'S THE BADGER!!!