Drupal

Homebrew is a package manager that makes it easy to install UNIX tools which don't come with OS X. Using the Homebrew package manager provides a great amount of control over the software installed on an OS X system, and it can be used to provide missing elements to run Drupal directly on OS X as a development environment.

I didn't set out to use Homebrew. I simply wanted to use wget instead of curl. I had no idea that would lead me to completely change my development setup.

TinyMCE provides two tools to facilitate cut & paste of text from a Microsoft Word document or web page into a web page with the Drupal content management system.

In TinyMCE 3.4.9, the “Paste from Word” feature will preserve basic Word document formatting while removing special Word-specific code that transparently accompanies a paste from Word which typically messes up the display of a web page.  The “Paste as Plain Text” feature, like Windows Notepad or Mac TextEdit, will strip out all formatting that accompanies content from a Word document or web page.

A technical case study into how we developed the new Planetizen Video Courses platform using Drupal 7 and Brightcove Cloud video hosting to deliver affordable online education to professionals in the urban planning, architecture, and related professions.

Integrating Drupal webforms with the popular CRM tool Salesforce is a common request from our clients. The concept works like this: Visitors fill out a contact webform on the Drupal website. That data is then transmitted to Salesforce, where it would be stored as a new record (or "lead" in CRM parlance.)

Slideshow is a popular feature on the front page of many web sites. Drupal makes it quite easy to build one. Here are the steps to build a Views-based slideshow in Drupal 7.

Drupal core function node_save() is used to save nodes and it is frequently used to programmatically alter and save nodes' data, which includes fields (aka CCK fields) as well. If you want to update a field of a node you could do it like this,

A really simple module can be very useful!

A number of the sites we host here at Urban Insight are monitored by Binary Canary. Binary Canary is a web service that continually checks to see if a website is online and sends out alerts when it's not. It can report system outages via email and SMS.

Binary Canary is a very reliable service, but there was one action on our part that would trip a false alarm occasionally. On a Drupal site, when updates need to be performed it's possible to forget that it is being monitored by Binary Canary and to put the site into maintenance mode without first disabling the monitoring service. When that would happen everyone on the alert list received a Binary Canary alert about one minute later.

I recently reviewed the documented usage for the PHP empty() function in the PHP manual at http://php.net/manual/en/function.empty.php.

Like many PHP programmers, I have learned a great deal from the online manual. I most often use the Function Reference section, which provides a comprehensive explanation of how to use functions and includes nice, practical examples.

A smart IT manager or system administrator who previously paid $50/year for a low cost shared-hosting environment for a static HTML website often needs to justify to management why the organization will need to spend more on higher-quality hosting for their new Drupal website. Following are seven criteria that you can use to evaluate Drupal hosting options.