Drupal Tips

Backup Strategies for Drupal Sites


A reliable, redundant backup strategy is a crucial element for any web site. Here we describe three different backup approaches: Basic Backup, Live Backup on a Separate Site, VirtualBox.

Add a Ruler to Catalog Images


 		An e-commerce site with thousands of product images needs to provide a visual cue for the size of the product. The solution: a shell scripts that uses Imagemagick utilities to add a ruler.

Converting Legacy Data to Drupal


 		In a project to develop a job search site, we needed to use official data from a government site which lists job vacancies. Using a combination of shell scripting, wget, perl and sql, we were able to load the data reliably into Drupal, including several taxonomies.

Custom Search on a Single Field using PHP, SQL, grep


 		A client with over 1,000 different products needed to be able to quickly search through the product codes using a partial string search. The built-in Drupal search engine does not support this at all. The solution uses standard UNIX programming tools called from Drupal.

Showing "Last Updated" Time Stamp on Price List


 		The client wanted to display the time and date of the latest change, to help its customers get oriented quickly. Drupal does not provide that capability out of the box, but it's easy to implement with a shell script using SQL on the host, plus a small PHP snippet to call the script inside a Drupal page.