Quicktips

Need to export data from your Drupal web site to Excel?

Use the Views Bonus Pack module - it gives you the ability to set your view's style to CSV, XML, DOC, and other formats.

Check it out!

I recently presented 45 Modules in 45 Minutes: The Best Modules You're Not Using at DrupalCon Paris. Here's a tip using one of the forty-five modules in my presentation.

The Better Messages module is a quick and simple drop-in module that will instantly give your site a bit of a "wow" factor by displaying all system messages in a floating CSS popup window over your content.

If you use CCK often, then you've probably at least once had to implement a select box where the user can select a year value. Sometimes they're used for birthdays, magazine issues, events, or even historical reasons.

You can easily populate the "Allowed values" textarea of the field's "edit" page, but how can you quickly set the default value to the current year (and not have to worry about changing it every year)?

One of my sites had a funny error complaining about an "unsupported form of compression" shortly after installing a new module. The browser would return a white screen of death with an error message (Safari and Firefox).

Content Encoding Error
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.

By now, you should know and love the Tracker module that comes with core. It has its strengths, but many weaknesses. For one, you can't separate out posts from comments, or sort the list in interesting ways. Views can help you make exactly the list you want, and place it in a tab on the user's profile exactly like the "Track" tab.

For this example, you'll be adding a list of comments. Creating the view is simple enough:

1. Clone the default view comments_recent, and call it comments_by_user
2. On the Page display, add a Relationship for Comment:User

There are often 17 ways to do any particular action with Drupal - here is #18 on the list of "How do I display related content on this node's page?" You'll be using the Views Attach module and a nodereference field.

In this example, you want to relate a photo to an event. Inside the photo's content type, create a nodereference field that is able to reference the event content type. When a user is adding a new photo, she will be able to choose the related event if applicable.

If you develop Drupal sites for clients, then you've no doubt been requested to change some of the default language found in Drupal core and/or contributed modules. For example, instead of "My account", your client wants it to read "User info". Or instead of "Create content", they request "Add stuff".

Depending on what type of product you sell on your Ubercart powered Drupal site, you may want to make it even easier for your users to increase the quantity of what they're ordering.

Yesterday's DrupalEasy Quicktip covered 3 modules that can extend Ubercart's functionality. Here's 3 more...

As terrific as Ubercart is for turning your Drupal site into an ecommerce powerhouse, there's a lot of additional modules that can extend its functionality. Here's a quick look at just a few of them:

Donations - want to accept donations from you site? Among other functionality, this module allows you to create a "product" where your donors to specify the amount they'd like to contribute.

There's a lot of times when you're building a site and trying to figure out the best way to do something. It doesn't matter if you're a newbie or a rockstar, if you're not familiar with a particular type of funcationality, you're going to need to do some homework to figure out the best solution.

One handy way of figuring out the best solution is by gathering up all the possible modules and comparing them. Unfortunately, this can be quick time-consuming. Luckily, there's an entire Drupal group devoted to exactly this!

One of the most requested features by content administrators is the ability to search by node title on the main content administration page (admin/content/node). Since this isn't a feature of Drupal core, some people have resorted to (gasp!) hacking core or writing custom modules to get it done.

Whenever you need to write a custom module that involves redirection using the drupal_goto() function, things can always get tricky - especially if there are other forces at work. One such force might be the "destination" variable that sometimes gets passed around in the URL querystring when the user is attempting to access content that requires authentication.

When creating a theme, it is often very handy to break up the CSS into multiple files for the purpose of keeping things better organized. Luckily, Drupal has built-in CSS optimization on the admin/settings/performance page, but during development it is sometime quite easy to run up a large number of CSS files being used.

Need an fast way to theme a submit button on your site? Using one hook_form_alter() function and some simple CSS, it's fairly easy to do.

The method below actually keeps the text of the button as text and not part of the image (this allows you to reuse the button image for multiple buttons), but you can just as easily set the #value attribute to '' to get rid of the text.

You'll use hook_form_alter() to simply add a CSS class to the button you want to theme and to modify the text of the button.