Welcome to the second part of the Drupal theming nightmares series. Not really surprised by the feedback I've got in the previous post. Most of you were enough lucky to stumble on the same problems. While the post was focused on the theming mistakes, it raised a discussion about unfinished jobs too. So if you haven't read it, it is right here: Drupal theming nightmares part 1.

That day, when I found out what I will be working with, I wasn't able to fall asleep (and it wasn't because of the litres of green tea I had). I was thinking about the person/company that wrote it, whether they are haunted in theirs dreams, do they even care? They should, you should, we all should. Take some responsibility for what you are doing. Do it right. I tend to ask people: "Would architect build a house ignoring physics?" Of course not, if he did, people might die. In our binary world we say kittens might die. Familiar right? But this could be another blog post. Lets move on.

read more

This is an Apache Directive that I've never had to use before, but it came in very handy for a very specific problem.

There was already an apache redirect (RewriteRule + RewriteCond) in place, but the destination URL was case sensitive! That's not normally a problem, but it was for an ad server, and the variables were coming in as uppercase, but needed to be lowercase after the redirect. Bad programming on the part of the ad server in my opinion, but we're not going to let that stop us! :)

RewriteMap to the rescue!

First off, the actual directive is a lot like a function definition, and it can only go in a config file or vhost, it's not allowed in a .htaccess file. Luckily the one we want to use is built in, so we just make it available with:

This makes the "lc" function is available in our rewrite rules. We start off with the condition and basic rule ...

read more

Barry and I just met with a team from Northscale -- the startup formed to support and extend Memcached, the popular key-value cache used by the largest web sites. We learned about their new database project, Membase, and talked about how it could help high-volume Drupal sites including our Acquia Hosting customers.

Membase is built on the core Memcached technology and supports the Memcached API. I'm excited about what they've done to extend Memcached: Read full article »

Earl Miles and Young Hahn join Dave Burns, Jeff Eaton, and Jeff Robbins to discuss the similarities and differences between Drupal's Panels and Context modules. Earl is the creator of Panels. Young is the co-creator of Context as well as Features, Spaces, and several other great modules. We open up the cage, toss everyone in, and see what happens!

Also be sure to check out David Burns' article "Assembling Pages with Drupal," which also compares and contrasts Panels and Context.

read more

Testing out the Drag'n'Drop Uploads module to see how it works.