Work with Drupal long enough and you'll soon discover the bits of HTML/CSS markup which have been hardcoded into Drupal core and/or it's contributed modules. This markup which is ready to go 'out of the box' is a very large part of what makes it so easy to for people who use Drupal to launch a functional and reasonably appealing looking site, very quickly - without having to become and HTML/CSS gurus themselves. Which is, of course, awesome.

For something gained, something is given, however. In this case a bit of flexibility. That's right - now that you've worked up enough gumption to try and get your Drupal installation to do a backwards somersault with a twist (e.g., highly customized theming of Drupal's output) the same hardcoded markup that made your life easier is likely to make it a bit messier if not just outright harder. It is at this point, typically, that the different kinds of "overrides" are recommended. In this post we'll take a quick look at common override techniques, as well as a less common, but potentially useful and easier, third option:  read more »

Learning PHP, at least enough of not to be overwhelmed by it, is a really good idea if you've installed Drupal.

"But it's complicated...and, and...it's scary looking - I don't wanna!"

Ok, for someone with a background in HTML/XHTML and CSS (or even less), PHP can be somewhat overwhelming at first. After all PHP is stuff for the 'backend/programmer' people and you're not one of 'those' people, right?

Well, if you're still working with a 'there are designer types and programmer types and betwixt and between the two shall never meet' mindset, Drupal is likely to be a long frustrating road for you unless you never plan to break out of the standard themes and/or functionality of core. Certainly that's a perfectly valid way to use Drupal, but it's not one that's a practical option for many who need or want to customize things.  read more »

Recently we had to figure out how to run XEN with bridged networking for our Now & XEN project. This is how to do it:

Edit /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp:

Put the attached network-bridge-both file into /etc/xen/scripts/ and change its permissions:

Edit the config file of each domU that needs access to the internal network and replace the vif line with this:
   read more »

Lately, we’ve had clients who have upgraded from PHP4/MySQL4 to PHP5/MySQL5, only to find that they have problems with custom PHP scripts and/or Drupal modules not working any more. When that happens, there’s two choices - fix the broken code/modules, or downgrade back to PHP4. As we’re primarily running CentOS 4.X on our systems, we’ve come up with instructions on how to perform a downgrade.  read more »

Recently we've been working with a couple of vendors to identify some potential solutions for scaling backend databases horizontally. This problem has been plagueing drupal.org, as well as many other large scale Drupal sites. Drupal.org has been plagued with database issues (as the infrastructure team is painfully aware), and we're doing what we can to help.

We've taken a look at third party hardware, software, and MySQL's own technologies, and some actually do have promise.

There are two scenarios we are dealing with, and they both have their own set of challenges to overcome.  read more »

After finding myself writing the same form handling code over and over and over (and over) again, I finally decided to do something about it.

And then FormCorral was born.

 read more »

Watchdog is a source of a lot of the database corruption and problems with Drupal and MySQL.

Khalid has a patch for Drupal 6, but in order for him to be able to find the time to backport the patch to Drupal 5, we need to sponsor it.

There are a few main reasons that this patch is worth supporting:  read more »

So one of the biggest things I've run into in drupal-land is that it's virtually impossible to test database interactivity without actually touching the data on a live site. I started kicking around some ideas last night and came up with a half-way solution that may solve at least the first round of headaches with this.

The Criteria

Ideally, I wanted a solution that:

1. does not rely on requests to the database to test a certain component.
2. preserves existing data
3. allows me to test certain conditions based on the way the data should be returned.  read more »

The seven + one things that determine the value of a technology startup and the problem with Defensive patents

After reading a recent article on patents, I felt somewhat compelled to make a few comments. Venture capitalists have their checkbooks out right now, and that’s something that a lot of entrepreneurs are noticing.  read more »