error reporting

When a user requests a page he's not allowed to see, he gets an 'Access denied' page with the message 'You are not authorized to access this page. '.

Sometimes the user has access to the page but he hasn't logged in yet. So to make the user's life easier, you provide him with a login form on the 'access denied' page so he can login immediately and gets redirected to the page he requested originally.

How do you do this?

Start by creating a new Page (node of type Page). Set the input format for the body to 'PHP code'. Start typing the message you want to give to the user, something like 'This page is restricted to logged in users. Please provide your credentials below.'.

You then display the login form my typing the following code below your message (or anywhere you want to put the login form):

<?php
print drupal_get_form('user_login');
?>

If you also want the 'Create new account' and 'Request new password' links under your form you can use the login block by typing the following code instead of the previous:

<?php
print drupal_get_form('user_login_block');
?>

Voila, your page is done. But you won't be able to see it since you are logged in right now. So to test your page log out and go to your page. If you don't know the drupal path of your page, go to Administer > Content Management > Content to find it.

To finish setting up your page, you have to tell Drupal to use your new page as the 'Access denied' page. You can do this by going to Administer > Site configuration > Error reporting and providing the drupal path of your new page for the 403 page.

By default Drupal discards your log entries older then one week. This is done to keep your database small and sharp by throwing out irrelevant log messages.

But sometimes you just want your log messages to be discarded at all. You can override Drupal's default behaviour by altering a setting in the administration section.

Go to Administer > Site configuration > Error reporting (admin/settings/error-reporting).

You will find a setting there saying 'Discard log entries older than'. Well, that was what we were looking for :)

By default, Drupal error logging happens to the log database (the watchdog table) and the screen. This is something I had overlooked for quite a while untill I stumbeled upon it while setting the error pages.