Quicktips

Working on an old Drupal 5 site (I was upgrading core), I came across a very odd bug. Every time I submitted a form, I was being redirected to the frontpage of the site. I had recently installed Path Auto and Global Redirect, so I thought one of those could be causing the problem.

With Global Redirect on, when I tried to visit a normal URL with an alias, in this case, node/2 that was aliased to services, I was also getting redirected to the home page.

On some of the Drupal administrative pages, you will encounter a great many checkboxes. This is especially true of the permissions page (User management > Permissions), which starts off with more than six dozen checkboxes for a vanilla Drupal 6 installation. Add a typical suite of contrib modules, and the number of checkboxes increases substantially. As a consequence, you may be forced to manually check or uncheck long sequences of checkboxes, which quickly becomes tedious and time-consuming.

Sometimes page caching can get in the way of your site's functionality - even for anonymous users. In those rare cases where you don't want page caching used, there's a module that allows you to exclude certain pages from being cached.

The Cache Exclude module has a simple configuration page where you can enter paths and pages on your site where you don't want caching to occur.

It's a great and simple solution to a sometime annoying problem.

While Imagecache is a stellar tool to automatically create and display resized and cropped images on your site, sometimes a bit more control is necessary.

Imagecache cropping is an automatic process that crops from the center of your image. So, if the most interesting part of your image is in the upper-left, it will most likely be cut off at least partially in the resulting image.

Ever downloaded a module and noticed several obvious bugs? Often, you can look in the issue queue for a module and find fixes, code patches, and help with these problems. For certain modules, the maintainer of the code may not respond - he or she may no longer be developing with Drupal, may have changed his or her email address, or any number of other factors.

If you are a Drupal module developer, then the title of this Quicktip might be enough for a lightbulb to suddenly appear above your head.

I was banging my head up against the wall trying to figure out how to update a view's description (normally set when you first create the view) and I put the question out to the twitterverse and @_happygolucky_ came to my rescue with this link that simply explains that the view description is hidden behind the "tag" link on the view editing page.

(how's that for a run-on sentence!)

I recently had a client who requested an easy way to create image captions for images added to their content via WYSIWYG and IMCE.

One of the many wonderful and useful forums over at groups.drupal.org is the Similar Module Review group.

Edit: you can also use ctools

Is there too much text on your page? Do you need to allow users to un-clutter an interface, or hide some of the interface until your users need it? Don't go and grab any extra JavaScript, Drupal can do collapsible fieldsets out of the box!

However, there are some steps involved:

The HTML Filter that comes with Drupal core is extremely useful - it allows you to restrict the HTML elements that you allow your content creators to use in their posts. If you don't want them including images or JavaScript, no problem. The filter settings allow you to specify exactly what HTML elements they are allowed to use.

One of the most actively used administration pages on any drupal site is the main content administration page (admin/content/node). From this page, the site administrator can quickly get a list of all the nodes on their site as well as filter and sort the list in a variety of ways.

However useful you may find this, you may not be aware that the Views Bulk Operations module provides an even more useful main content administration page with the often requested "search by title" filter.

If you've done much Drupal theming, then you're probably aware that you can override the default node.tpl.php template file on a per-content type basis. For example, if you have a content type called "food", then you can create a node-food.tpl.php that will be used only when nodes of type "food" are displayed.

A full list of template suggestions can be found on drupal.org.

Exposed filters in Views are a wonderful thing. They allow your site visitors the ability to dynamically alter a view to suit their needs best. But what happens when you display your view in a block?

Exposed filters on View pages use URL querystring variables to pass the filter variables back to the server, but when your view is displayed in a block, this isn't possible.