Drupal

How to turn off Vertical Tabs for a specific content type

Posted by Aaron Hawkins September 21, 2011

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I rarely do any heavy structural changes to node edit pages, so until today I hadn't ever had a reason to disable vertical tabs on a specific content type, but there's a first time for everything.

Now there are people who recommend turning it off by editing the $conf variable in the settings.php file... however, this is not an option on this particular site since it is running on Aegir, which automatically rewrites the settings.php file. So I had to find another way. I took a look at the vertical tabs code and came up with an easy solution.

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Drupal Theming Drupal Module Development Advanced Drupal Tutorials

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How to handle a multisite installation with Mamp (using symlinks and virtual servers)

Posted by Aaron Hawkins September 7, 2011

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Every once in a while you run into a problem that forces you to either dig in and learn more than you really had the intention of learning, or return the client's down payment. I ran into such a situation recently with an odd Drupal multisite installation.

Drupal handles multisite installs by routing to the folder in the sites directory which has the name of the site in question. So test.pixelcever.com would run off of the settings.php file located in sites/test.pixelclever.com.

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Drupal Mac / Apple Command Line Advanced Drupal Tutorials

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How to fix the issue with images not showing up in the catalog or in the cart for Ubercart

Posted by Aaron Hawkins September 26, 2010

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I spent several hours banging my head up against the wall looking for a solution to the missing images on the Ubercart catalog and the checkout cart section. I searched and I searched and on google I found scores of other frustrated developers who had run into the same problem, but I didn't find any solution posted. It turns out that the actual solution is very simple, but downright unintuitive.

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Drupal Administration Ubercart Basic Drupal Tutorials

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How to make views accept multiple CCK values as arguments

Posted by Aaron Hawkins September 11, 2010

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As of the date of this writing views 2 for Drupal does not have a canned method of accepting multiple arguments that are CCK fields. The case where this came up for me was in a CCK select field that had dynamically generated options (created through php). The options were years, and the user was allowed to chose multiple years. How then, can one set a view to dynamically filter for content that had been marked with at least one of the years sent in the argument?

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Drupal Administration Drupal Module Development Advanced Drupal Tutorials

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CCK create automatically updating year select field

Posted by Aaron Hawkins September 10, 2010

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When you want to create a list of years as a select field in CCK ranging from some set date in the past to the current date you have a couple of options. The first option would be to go through and manually enter every year from that date to present. This may be ok if you only are working with a date range of 3 or 4 years, but what if you want to list the years since the 1800s. Obviously that list would be painful to make, and what's worse you would have to make sure the site was updated every year by someone competent enough not to destroy the information.

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Drupal Theming Drupal Module Development Intermediate Drupal Tutorials PHP Tutorials

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How to remove spaces when using term names or node titles for views arguments (SEO Optimization)

Posted by Aaron Hawkins September 9, 2010

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There seems to be some debate as to whether there is an actual SEO penalty to using spaces or the encoded %20 in urls. I've spent some time researching the matter and I wasn't able to come away with any conclusive evidence one way or the other. However, when a client wants a site with no spaces or %20 in the urls that is in itself a deciding factor.

Apparently my client and I aren't the only ones that ran into this problem, and perhaps I wasn't the only one to come up with this solution, but I didn't find it posted anywhere else on the internet, so I am going to post it here.

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Drupal Administration Intermediate Drupal Tutorials

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How to create a custom template file for a form with Zen subthemes

Posted by Aaron Hawkins September 1, 2010

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There are two stages of understanding needed in order to create a template file for a form in a Zen subtheme. The first level in my opinion is to understand how to achieve that same result in a normal theme.

In a normal theme all we need to know in order to create a working tpl (template file) for a form is the form id in question and the format to connect that form to the tpl from within the template.php file.

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Drupal Drupal Theming Advanced Drupal Tutorials

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Search Engine Optimization for Drupal

Posted by Aaron Hawkins May 27, 2010

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Getting your website built to look the way you want is important, but what good does it do if no one can find your site from Google? When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), Drupal is one of the best systems to work with. However, it is best to be aware of the SEO impact of design and development choices from the beginning of a project in order to save time and money in the long run.

When I build sites I always keep search engine optimization in mind, and I do my best to make clients aware of the common pitfalls which can destroy your site ranking.

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Inbound link generation for SEO

Posted by Aaron Hawkins May 27, 2010

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Building inbound links is widely known by SEO experts to be the most crucial factor in Search Engine Optimization. There are a lot of different ways to generate inbound links for your site. However, most of these methods require constant work on your part or on the part of your employees or a SEO firm.

Using Drupal as a starting point I have developed a technique of developing thousands of quality inbound links that builds over time with little or no maintenance required.

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Mac OSX + Drush = Time saved

Posted by Aaron Hawkins February 1, 2010

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The longer I have my mac the more things I find that drastically simplify my life as a Drupal developer. Now for fairness sake I should admit that there are still some things about mac that annoy me (namely Finder which is in many ways inferior to the windows explorer), but that is another story all together. Drush, the command line tool for Drupal is one of those many little things that make me very happy to have broken free from the slimy grasp of Bill Gates and his minions.