Website design blog

Sometimes debuging Drupal can get confusing. I blame the lack of oop (we want you so bad Drupal 7) , the lack of mvc, and some kind of evil gnomes plans to take over the world (but more on this latter).

So in case you're going crazy trying to figure out what goes wrong in some otherwise great Dru[pal module, here's little function i got from an interesting article on lulabot about debugging Drupal:

SInce we're in the Drupal modules area, i ran some while back into a nice artcile: Top 10 Drupal Modules. It's a pretty precise best of Drupal.

Some three years ago, the nice people at Drupal launched a service that gathered statistical data from deployed drupal sites, regarding the modules they used. This was mainly to solve the problem of which module to use for a particular purpose.

Went a bit in circles one day trying to figure out how to change the favicon for a drupal site. So, to change the default drupal favicon you should:

Administer > Themes > Configure (your theme) > (scroll down to) Shortcut icon settings. Upload your image.

Found a great article on integrating feedburner in a drupal website. Check it out if you ever find yourself craving feedburner on your drupal site.

If you need to only show a php page to a certain ip, a quick dirty way would be :

if ($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] != '82.76.167.52')
{
  exit();
}

Unlike most basic things in drupal, adding a user pictures to nodes like the forum, is not such an easy intuitive task. So after looking around i gathered this:

To add a user picture on posts:
- select pictures in /admin/user/settings
- allow pictures in the theme at admin/build/themes/settings (also in the specific used theme if there is one)

I had a problem with an error that kept popping up "mysql server has gone away error" in drupal. After some reading around the internets, i figured it was hapening because drupal was pushing the mysql server too hard (http://drupal.org/node/227445).
An easy way around this was to turn off some modules i didn't really need.

Hope this helps.

I had problems with the adsense code not working in a drupal block.
Aparently you need to select as input format "php" instead of "full html" to make it work.
Good thing i trust google enough to try that.
Not sure why it's like this.

If you need to raise money from the visitors of your site theres a nice widget that does that, chipIn.
I saw it used by Drupal to raise money for finishing porting some code to a new version. It puts the money in your paypall account and doesnt charge anything.
Pretty cool.