Le blog de Aaron

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.

Most of the time the default download path that Drush uses for modules is perfectly fine (sites/all/modules), and until this week I’ve never had a reason to alter it. However, I happen to be working on an Aegir multisite install right now and I’ve been given access to only the site specific folder for that domain (meaning I don’t have remote access to sites/all/modules). In this case downloading modules to the sites all folder while developing on my local machine is not a good idea as it would require remembering which modules needed to be moved.

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.

This tutorial starts with a situation that can easily occur if you are taking over an existing website from a different developer, and for one reason or another you need to move the site off of the old svn account and on to another one that you or the client control.

There are obviously many ways to achieve this goal, but this is the method that I prefer.

To start open a terminal prompt (or a cywin prompt if you are using Windows) and navigate to the working copy on you local computer. Once in the correct folder type the following command and hit enter:

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.

If you develop with Drupal chances are you spend a lot of time searching for information on Drupal.org, I know I do. With this in mind one day I decided to see what it would take to build a Drupal.org and an api.drupal.org search plugin for Firefox.

I have nothing against new Drupal users on Drupal.org, even the most advanced Drupal developers were new to Drupal at one point or another, but I have seen a pattern among certain new users that drives me crazy. In fact it drove me crazy back even when I was new to Drupal myself: the abuse of the term newbie.
Ok I admit that that sounds like a pretty weird thing to say, but I have a well formulated psychological analysis to back me up. Hear me out people.

It’s kind of a love hate relationship I have with Adobe. They have the monopoly on the design world so I use their software daily, and for the most part it works, but there are some things that drive me batty. Each time there is a new version released I hold on to the faint hope that maybe this time they removed some of those glaring annoyances or put in the really obvious features that have been needed for years. Occasionally my disappointment is softened by some minor improvements, sometimes it’s not.

Drupal hit it big when version 5 came out. Before this time it had a considerable user base, but it hadn’t gone main stream yet. The transition from Drupal 4 to Drupal 5 was extremely quick. No one held on to Drupal 4 and all significant modules released 5x versions within a few months. When Drupal 6 came out last year I think many of us expected the same kind of quick upgrading and transitioning, but alas, and many important modules have taken their sweet time coming out with a 6x release.

The last time I visited the safari download page at apple.com I was shocked to see that they had posted a banner that read: Download Safari The world’s best browser. If you aren’t a web developer you might not understand why I would be shocked, if you are a web developer it shouldn’t be surprising at all.