Essential Drupal Tips

[giza]

I just wrote an article covering some "gotchas" in Drupal 4.6.5. This is intended for people who are new to Drupal. It can be found on the web at:

http://www.claws-and-paws.com/node/887

Enjoy! Feedback is welcome.

[Edit: In a case of Murphy's law, my webhost had data center problems right after I posted the link. It's fixed now.]

Comments

[bigtig.livejournal.com]

There must be some interesting gotcchas to discuss:

Safari can’t open the page “http://www.claws-and-paws.com/node/887” because it could not load any data from this location.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I got that too. Seeing that my webhost's site is not loading either, I suspect they are having system/network problems. Bummer.

[giza.livejournal.com]

It's fixed now. My webhost (http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/) had a little oopsie over at their datacenter. :-/

[pyesetz]

creating/modifying a node or a block causes the entire cache to be wiped. This can be a handy trick

It's got "bug" written all over it.  I hope they fix it.  And why can't you mark pages as "cache for x minutes even for logged-in users"?

warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /nfsn/content/claws2/htdocs/includes/bootstrap.inc:495) in /nfsn/content/claws2/htdocs/includes/common.inc on line 99

Are you *sure* Drupal is better than doing it by hand?

[giza.livejournal.com]

> It's got "bug" written all over it. I hope they fix it.

How? When you change a page, you don't want stale data in the cache, so the cache should be wiped. Makes sense to me.

> And why can't you mark pages as "cache for x minutes even for logged-in
> users"?

Because users tend to do things like post to forums or reply to other peoples' posts or even make new pages if they have the privs. I guess that pages could be cached conditionally, but that would add lots of complexity. I'm not sure if that's a good idea.

> Are you *sure* Drupal is better than doing it by hand?

Well, that's just peachy. But one thing I like about Drupal is that it logged what you just saw to the logs that I can view. Looking at the logs, it looks like your specific visit triggered a run of poormanscron (http://drupal.org/project/poormanscron), so there might be an issue there relating to interaction with poormanscron. Thing is, poormanscron runs every 10 minutes and I don't see this regularly. I'll keep an eye on that.

And yes, I think Drupal is better than doing it by hand, because I can still contribute to parts of it. (And I do, I've contributed several patches and even wrote my own module (http://drupal.org/project/sanity)) The sum of all this is greater than I could ever do by myself.