Drupal Planet

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has recently launched its Collections Online site, an online image library where art lovers can explore and download high quality images. This is a triumph for the accessibility of fine art in an increasingly digital world. Making this vast collection public benefits not only local art lovers but also the international art community, particularly students.

This image, called "Shiva as the Lord of Dance", is one of the more popular images on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's new Collections website. This image of Shiva is one of 20,000 high-quality images of artwork that the museum has made freely available to download and use as you see fit.

Varnish cache is an accelerator that sits in front of the web application, and serves cached web pages. It can speed up the web site significantly and lift loads off the web application. The web application gets to receive web traffic through Varnish. The unintended side effect is that all incoming traffic for the web application look as if they are originating from a single IP, say, 127.0.0.1, because they do come from a single source, Varnish.

Here is how to configure Drupal 7, Varnish and Apache web server to log correct client IP addresses.

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You are working in Drupal and want to build out a Blog component for a website project you are working on. You start off in all the normal places -- build your content type, construct your views, setup any image styles -- and before you know it you have this nagging feeling like you’ve done all this before.

We often set up staging sites for clients, and deploy all enhancements to that staging site first so that the client has an opportunity to test and validate new features before they go live. These staging sites occasionally contain production data to make testing easier and more realistic, which also means that even real user e-mail addresses can make their way to it. This potentially implies the risk of sending out unwanted e-mails to those addresses.

When someone first starts working with Drupal—either as a developer or as the website client—it's really helpful to have basic terms explained in an understandable way.  This is my attempt to provide simple definitions for the Drupal terms content type, content item, node, template and theme.

Drupal 7 has built-in support for draggable tables that enables users to order rows by dragging the cross hair icon up and down. You can see one example at the admin setting for text input format (path: /admin/config/content/formats).

drupal_add_tabledrag() function is the secret to building draggable tables. Here is how to do it.

When setting up content types on a more involved site, a developer could easily end up with having an enormous list of fields in one single content type. When this happens, I tend to pause for a second, and think through whether there is any way to consolidate that list. Chances are, I find a field or two whose values either depend on other fields or can be generated without user input. These are the exact scenarios where the Computed Field module can be a great choice.

Debugging is an integral part of any development process, and the time it requires tends to add up to a significant part of the total development time. Therefore, it is wise to consider various debugging tools and select the one that fits your working habits and conditions best to save time.

Among the aspects of debugging, logging debug messages is the one that I believe is most relevant in Drupal development. In this post, I am reviewing three different options to log events or messages in Drupal.

Hosting is anything but a one size fits all situation. Sites which demand the highest performance will certainly benefit from customized backend architecture and tuning. For the large majority of less demanding sites, there is the spectrum from the few dollars per month shared managed hosting to the VPS (virtual private server).

At Urban Insight we've found that some Drupal sites are a good fit with hosting on Rackspace Cloud Sites. One requirement of ours is automated backups, which Rackspace Cloud Sites does not provide. Rackspace does provide some help with this in the form of scripts that can be used for backups, but you need to do the setup yourself, and one feature we wanted was lacking. What follows is a quick overview of setting up a Drupal site on Rackspace Cloud Sites with an emphasis on backups and how we added the missing backup feature we wanted, rotating backups.