Drupal coder

How to debug outgoing mails in Drupal?

There are a few issues involved when you are developing a Drupal website that needs to send out mails. When you need to test the sending of these e-mails you might want to see the results instantly without waiting for the actual mail to be delivered or you might want to test the mail with multiple addresses (instead of always your own) but you might not want to send out the actual mail. And in some cases you might not even have access to a mail server in your development environment.

As always, there are a few options to solve these issues in Drupal.

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March 24, 2010 — debugging, Drupal, module development

Preparing Ubuntu Server for hosting Drupal sites

With the cheap prices of VPS hosting services these days, pretty much anyone can run his own server. Hosting your Drupal site on a VPS has a lot of advantages over running your site on shared hosting, but is a bit more difficult to get started. Using the following guide, you should be able to set up an Ubuntu Server on your VPS pretty easily. You'll install a full system with Apache, MySQL, SSH Server, PhpMyAdmin, ... We'll also configure the system with some minor tweaks that will cause a major performance boost over a barebones install.

Let's get started...

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March 21, 2010 — Drupal, hosting, server management

Introduction to Drupal for (non-Drupal) developers

With Drupal developers becoming very popular on the job market, the demand for guidance of developers from other technologies becomes high. Last week, with the publication of the article Becoming a Drupal coder: a wise carreer move a clean document guiding to all Drupal information resources online and offline was published.

It happens to be I'm doing a presentation this week targetted at developers working with another technologies. So I decided to publish my presentation slides.

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March 16, 2010 — Drupal, presentation

Spread your cron schedule on machines running multiple Drupal sites

Here's a quick tip for people running multiple Drupal instances on one server: don't run cron for all sites on the same moment but try to spread it.

Suppose I have 5 sites: site1.tld, site2.tld, ... and I want to run cron each 12 hours. I would enter the following using crontab:

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March 05, 2010 — cron, Drupal, performance

New Drupal book : Drupal 6 Performance Tips

Drupal 6 Performance TipsPackt Publishing is on a roll. They have been releasing a few Drupal books recently on a broad variety of topics. We have seen books on Social Networking with Drupal, JavaScript and jQuery, multimedia, ...

Last week they have released a new book focusing on performance and maintenance, called Drupal 6 Performance Tips. Although the title focusses on the performance topic, a lot of tips are also provided for maintaining or developing your site.

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March 02, 2010 — books, Drupal, performance, reviews

drupalcoder.com is a blog on all things Drupal in specific and LAMP on OS X in general. It is maintained by Davy Van Den Bremt, a Belgian (Drupal) web developer and designer living in Ghent. The goal of this blog is to log all interesting things that have crossed the writer's path while developing Drupal sites. You can read all about Davy's professional activities on his LinkedIn profile. If you want to get in touch, use the contact form.