Panic Coda Drupal snippets (clips)
I've been using Panic's Coda as my default editor/IDE for some time now. I've already shared the Drupal plugin I wrote on this blog. But one of the other tricks Coda allows me to do is snippet management using its Clips feature. There's quite a few Coda clips available on the net. Here I am sharing the Clips I use the most during Drupal development and theming.
How to create URL aliases in Drupal without path module
Creating pretty urls or permanent links in Drupal is easy. Really easy. This functionality comes out of the box with the Path module. And by adding the contributed Pathauto module you can make your life easier by letting Drupal generate the pretty urls automatically based on some properties of your post (like the title).
But there's another way of doing this in Drupal. Drupal provides a mechanism in code by means of the custom_url_rewrite_inbound and custom_url_rewrite_outbound functions. Using these wisely may give you some performance gain. Let's see how you can use these.
Drupal 7 multisite improvement : multi-site directory aliasing
Using Drupal's multisite feature, one can use a single codebase for multiple sites. This leaves a smaller footprint and makes your sites more maintainable since you only have to update one bunch of files.
This was already possible in versions prior to Drupal 7 by creating a configuration directory whose name was based on the site's hostname and pathname.
Although easy to setup this was sometimes cumbersome to maintain if you had different copies of your site running on different locations. During the creation of a site, one might typically maintain a development copy, an acceptation copy and a production copy. All these are on different locations. This would lead to creating several versions of the settings directory for one particular site.
In Drupal 7 a solution is provided for this particular problem. A new configuration file is available under the sites folder, called "example.sites.php". Using that file you can set up directory aliases. To see what those are, let's look at a particular example.
Configure links on modules overview page in Drupal 7
One of the smaller improvements in Drupal 7 is the addition of "Configure" and "Permissions" for each module in the modules configuration page. For each module we now have quicklinks pointing to the module's configuration page and the correct section on the "permissions" page.
Since we're all working hard now on making our contributed modules Drupal 7 compatible, I wanted to mention here how to make use of this small feature in your own module.
The "permissions" link is added there automatically by Drupal. For the "Configure" link you need to add one more line to your module's info file.
What's new in Drupal 7 Alpha 1 ?
Yesterday, January 15, 2010 was a big day for Drupal. Our beloved CMS became 9 years old! And boy, did it mature well. To celebrate its birthday, Webchick (Angie Byron), Drupal 7's maintainer released the first alpha version of Drupal 7.
Since a lot of people are wondering what's new in version 7, I decided to gather a list where you can find this out.