In Drupal 5, if you want the User Profile page (e.g. http://example.com/user/stevejobs) to display latest comments by that user, you can apply a quick hack: Create or edit user.profile.tpl.php file in your theme Add the following code anywhere (wherever you want latest comments to appear) in the file:\ <?php$output = ""; $nlimit = 7;$userid=$user->uid;// ATTENTION:...

Just how addicted to Apple are you? Apparently, I am 94% addicted. Not really a surprise to anybody who knows me :)

As you know Drupal displays the “Read more” link among all other after-teaser links in the blog postings view. This is not a usual user-experience. Most users expect “read more” link to be right after the teaser part of the posting. It can get confusing, so following is a quick-n-dirty hack that can fix it...

Usually, you do not want websites that are still under development to be visible to the Web at large. Even if you do not care about that, at the least - you do not want such websites to be indexed by search engine bots. Bottomline - you want the “dev” websites behind a lock. One...

It’s official - we are migrating to FCKeditor A WYSIWYG HTML editor is a necessary part of any Web-based, CMS system. You simply can not expect user audience to be fluent in HTML. We’ve been using TinyMCE with IMCE (for image upload), in all our Drupal installations, for a long time now. About 2 years...

In our recent post we tried to introduce you with the HTTP request life-cycle in Drupal. If you read the post, hopefully you have a better understanding of what stages a request goes through in Drupal. Today we will try to give a specific example of how this understanding can help you in your daily...

One of the most powerful ways to debug a web application is using logging; especially for a highly complex system like Drupal. PHP comes with a built-in logging function: error_log();. The exact behavior of this function depends on several configuration parameters. We suggest that you log into standard Apache error log and create one log...

You can not use YouTube’s “embedable” code snippet in a WYSIWYG Javascript editor like TinyMCE. That can get very uncomfortable, leading to frequent need to switch back-and-forth between the HTML view and WYSIWYG view. Not user-friendly at all. Fortunately, TinyMCE does have a “plugin” that supports Youtube. Download: file youtube_xhtml_workaround.zip from the YouTube Button Issue...

In this blog post I try to list the sequence of steps Drupal 5 takes to process an HTTP request. I have not seen it all put together in any one place. I do, however, believe that understanding the request life-cycle is crucial to grasping how a web-system works, so I hope this post will...

An interesting review, from Aron Novak, of different feed aggregators available in Drupal: http://groups.drupal.org/node/4547

Pierre today needed a Drupal hack to limit the set of roles, members of which would be displayed on a Drupal users listing page. This is the listing that comes up when you access a URI like: http://example.com/profile. Of course, it took us less than 5 minutes to figure-out how to do it, since Drupal...

Last week, the major news on the Web was the launch of OpenSocial. Google did an excellent job documenting APIs and publishing quick-start tutorials and videos, as well as signing-up an impressive group of early adopters. All that is left to us, the blogger by-standers, is to review, envy and criticize. That is exactly what...

On numerous LAMP servers we run, we repeatedly experienced an odd and disturbing problem. Users were fed some “random” ASCII text, instead of a rendered page, leaving them in complete frustration. After rigorous investigation, we came to a conclusion that the problem lies in a combination of PHP’s zlib compression and eAccelerator. The odd part...

Web these days is full of spam-bots, malicious crawlers and other “e-pests” that post junk-advertising all over the Net. These parasites give the most headache to blogs and social sites, where moderators want to free-up comments to general audience (“Two-Way Communication”, eh?), but have no desire to promote illegal Viagra sales. Captcha, or Completely Automated...

As web applications become increasingly smarter and powerful, we start to spend more time in a browser window than in any other desktop application. MS Office-replacement suites like Google Apps, are first to come to mind, but there are many other cool apps. Web-based collaboration is especially web-centric. Wikis, blogs and community sites are all...