Drupal

Another detailed article, this time on how to upgrade from D6 to D7: http://www.ostraining.com/blog/drupal/migrate-drupal-6-to-drupal-7/

Reference to another detailed article: http://renaudjoubert.com/en/article/setting-multilingual-menus-d7

There's a nice article from Makina-Corpus on the topic here: http://www.makina-corpus.org/blog/separate-cache-backends-drupal6-and-drupal7 Notably, the cache_backport module in Drupal 6 backports the cache handlers from Drupal 7 (replaces cacherouter, in a way).

If you happen to develop large sites in Drupal, you might fall upon a case like this one, where different servers (namely at least one reverse proxy and one web server) interact, causing a series of chain reactions every time you change something. It might be frustrating, at times, to try and boost a coordinated system like this, and end up getting your users frustrated because part of it doen't work, when the rest (the part that *does* work) is super-fast.

In Drupal's Boost module, there is a feature setting a cookie called DRUPAL_UID that then lets Apache (or whatever web server you have) avoid serving cached pages to authenticated users. Well it seems this feature was broken sometime in 2011-2012 (before July 2012), so you might have banged your head against the wall trying to understand why your login box still appeared after login, or some similar effect. Well, bang it no longer.

I had serious problems with a Drupal website with many Varnish optimizations.

This command might be useful if you want to auto-generate the Boost module cache files on a Drupal site

wget -r -l4 --spider -D thesite.com http://www.thesite.com

Let's analyse the options...

-r indicates it's recursive (so "follow the links" and look for more than one page)

-l indicates the number of levels we want to recurse. If you are on the first page and you follow a link, you are at level 1. If you follow a link on that last page, you are at level 2, etc

--spider indicates not to download anything (we just want to go through the pages, that's all)

Just as a self reminder, and because I don't fancy too much looking into the Drupal core for debugging, here is a short explanation of how the Drupal 7 bootstrap mechanism works. First of all, a bootstrap mechanism is a mechanism by which you work progressively your way through the full loading of a system, step by step, starting with the loading of simple elements that will allow you to load more complex elements. The Linux system also has a bootstrap mechanism (as do most OSes).

In Drupal 7, there is a *very tricky* problem you might fall upon at some point. We did and because it's not *really* a Drupal bug (although it could be considered as a usability bug), it's worth writing down. The problem is simple: one admin (Joe) and two editors (Sam and Max) edit a website. They all create their own content of the type "artist". They all have permissions to "Create artist", "Edit own artist", "Edit all artist" and "Delete artist". Also, the "artist" content type has a text body which can use the "Pure text" format, the "Filtered HTML" format and the "Full HTML".

I searched for this a long time just to find it was very easy to do, so I hope this helps you too. The objective of this short guide is to explain how to build a view in Drupal 7 that will let you search for part of a title of a specific content. Let's say your site is about music and you have a content type called "Song", which has an artist and a title. Now let's say you want to search on the title and let the user select a search term. It's very easy to get distracted by the "Contextual filters" option.