Adding Rules to your contrib module (so you can reject half the tickets in your queue) Apr 18, 2013
How to set up Apache Solr Multicore for Drupal Apr 18, 2013
How to uninstall Dolly Drive Mar 05, 2013 {% raw %} I recently tried the Dolly Drive backup service, and decided it wasn't for me. Foolishly, I uninstalled it the way you uninstall everything on OSX: by dragging it's Application icon to the Trash. I thought it was gone for good... it wasn't until weeks later that I noticed my system would gradually slow down after boot. This is a brand new Macbook Pro, so there's no good reason for slow down. ...
Announcing the Resource Conflict Drupal module Jun 13, 2012 {% raw %} I recently took over an aging Drupal module, Resource Conflict. It had a D6 version with a lot of outstanding bugs in the queue... I started by simply rewriting it for D7 and my specific use case, but ended up in a discussion with the module's old maintainer about a total rewrite for Entities and Rules. So that's what I did, and I just released the 7.x-3.x-dev version. Resource Conflict USED to be a module that detected booking conflicts in resources, and threw a form error. ...
Drupal developers' toolkit: handy tools and functions to make your life easier Jun 08, 2012 {% raw %} Drupal is big and complex, and no matter how good you are, you will need to debug. Before you get started coding for a Drupal site, you should download and enable the very useful devel module on your dev site. Go ahead, I'll wait. This primer covers all the tools that I'll use in later tutorials on this blog. In the real world I end up using 5-6 of these guys regularly. ...
Drupal quick learning guides: Custom modules Apr 23, 2012 {% raw %} Ah, it's nice to be done with the basic structure stuff. At this point, I'm going to assume that you know the basics of how to administer a Drupal site. You understand the file structure, you know where to go to download themes and modules, and you know how to make sites out of the big pieces you can find that way. Awesome. This is where it gets fun. ...
Drupal quick learning guides: Drupal structure Apr 16, 2012 {% raw %} I've been lax about posting lately, and to make this easier on myself I think I'll post a bunch of quick guides for basic coding procedures with Drupal. Simple things and concepts, explored in just enough detail for you to understand how it works, resource links so you can actually go and put it into practice. The first thing you need to understand about Drupal is the structure. ...
On Drupal Entities, or how Organic Groups and Taxonomy are the same thing Mar 25, 2012 {% raw %} I'm a big fan of the new Entities model for Drupal. I've been working a lot with it lately, and it makes a lot of sense... but my favorite part is how it keeps blowing away my old assumptions, inherited from 7 years of Drupal experience. Here's a big one that got me recently: Organic Groups is useless, because it's basically Taxonomy with a couple of neat add-ons. ...
Sony hacked AGAIN - time to turn out the lights? May 24, 2011 {% raw %} Ouch, Sony. Hot on the heels of the last 4 hacks have come another two in a row. Sony BMG Greece was hacked on Monday, and now Sony BMG Japan. Though I stand by my comments from my earlier post (see: What the Sony hacks tell us about their Sysadmins and Management), there is another important dimension to this story. That's the dimension of a feeding frenzy. ...
The complete Drupal Cache - Serving HTTP and HTTPS content with Varnish May 22, 2011 {% raw %} Varnish is a fantastic caching proxy, commonly used for CMSes. It's not uncommon to see benchmarks boasting 300-500 page loads per second - I've seen benches up to 5000 hits per second. That's faster than serving flat HTML from Apache; we're talking about a serious benefit to your server load here. Part of Varnish's tremendous speed comes from how lean it is. At only 58,000 lines of code, it's very lightweight. ...