Drupal Easy -

Moving the comment form without hacking core

info@liberatr.net (Ryan Price) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 05:54:59 +0000

One of the most frustrating things about Drupal's current architecture is that comments, and the form to post them, are attached to nodes and don't easily allow you to move them around in your TPL files. There really should be an easier way to just place them anywhere you'd like. Most times this doesn't get in your way, until you want to do some fancy layouts where your content is split into multiple columns on the page.

Relate all nodes from one taxonomy to another with MySQL

info@liberatr.net (Ryan Price) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:18:45 +0000

When using taxonomy to group nodes on your Drupal site, you find a need to apply another taxonomy term to all of those nodes (possibly from a different vocabulary) there is nothing that is going to be shorter and sweeter than some quick SQL-fu.

Rebuild your node_comment_statistics table

info@liberatr.net (Ryan Price) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 04:32:58 +0000

If you're like me, most of your projects are redesigns of existing sites. And if the site is already on some kind of CMS, this means importing content from the old system into Drupal, and to make it easy you'll do it with MySQL directly.

There are pros and cons about this approach, which I am learning, and one of the cons is that content created by the database may not always get plugged into all of Drupal's various tables. Sure, you got the text into node, node_revisions, can your CCK tables, but there is more than meets the eye.

Import Hundreds of Taxonomy Terms using AWK

info@liberatr.net (Ryan Price) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 19:00:22 +0000

Today's challenge: your editors just handed you almost 200 taxonomy terms to add to the site, and you don't have the time or inclination to hit the taxonomy/n/add/term page for the next 2 hours or so... AWK to the rescue!

Doing a simple CSV export of the term_data and term_hierarchy tables, you've got a pretty simple structure:

term_data
tid,vid,name,description,weight

term_hierarchy
tid,parent

What you'll ultimately generate here is a file that stores everything you need to know about importing these terms via a CSV - the term names, the weights, good IDs, and the TID of the parents.

2048,#the current value of the sequences for term_data
term,34,Blogs,#a helper line
x,1,Drupal,All about Drupal,-5
x,1,Modules,Ways to extend Drupal,-4
x,1,Themes,Making your install pretty,-3
term,35,News,#a second helper line
x,1,International,,0
x,1,Local,,0
x,1,Hyperlocal,,0

In this file, we've got 3 types of data:

The starting value for sequences
The id of the parent term for the next several rows, starting with the word "term" followed by the TID and the plain English name just to help us get organized
The new terms, with an "x" where the new TIDs will be placed, and the VID, Description and Weight all filled out.

US States list for CCK select boxes

info@liberatr.net (Ryan Price) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 21:07:11 +0000

When defining Content Types in Drupal with the Content Construction Kit you are able to add select boxes to them with CCK. It takes its
key/value pairs in this format: Key|Value. One of the most common tasks for this is to create a drop down list of US States. So to save folks some time, I have compiled a list for you to paste right into your own projects. The attached text file will give you US States in the expected format.

Hopefully this will save others a bit of typing when you need such a list for your own Drupal projects. Enjoy!

Drupal Theming: $path vs. base_path and path_to_theme

info@liberatr.net (Ryan Price) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:52:26 +0000

When developing Drupal themes, there is one bit of code you type over and over again:

sites/all/themes/blueprint/images/whatever.jpg

Where images/whatever.jpg could be a css file, or other file, but is normally an image.

However, since clean URLs in Drupal appear to make fake directories, the web browser thinks your image is located in:

node/345/sites/all/themes/blueprint/images/whatever.jpg

When it’s not. Luckily Drupal has tools to help you in this case.

Blogs About Drupal

info@liberatr.net (Ryan Price) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 03:42:33 +0000

This is rather self-serving, but I actually got quite a bit of traffic on this site in the last few days, and that made me wonder if some older posts I've written on my personal blog were worth anything. There was really just one useful one:

Using Views 2 and Drupal 6 to Create a Related Pages Block

info@liberatr.net (Ryan Price) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:09:10 +0000

Today's question comes from Dale at NFi Studios in Orlando, FL - my home town:

Essentially:, what i'm trying to do is
1. Determine the current nodes taxonomy terms
2. Determine all other pages that share taxonomy terms
3. Display the title (and link) to those pages in a block

Using Drupal 6.2 and Views - Looked at a few modules, but nothing quite
exact - Reviewing some module snippets right now to see if I can
potentially use an argument to do it.

read more

Using AWK to Download and Unpack Drupal Modules

info@liberatr.net (Ryan Price) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:54:15 +0000

When installing a new Drupal site (or when your list of available updates gets nice and long), you'll often have to download tons of modules, unpack them, and copy all of the resulting directories to your sites/all/modules directory. Personally, I'm not a fan of all the clicking, downloading, unzipping and most of all waiting!

Today I finally settled on a workflow that gets the job done, and it's called the UNIX command line. If your server doesn't use some flavor of UNIX or Linux, or if your web host doesn't allow you shell access, you may want to stop reading after the next paragraph.

Editing HTML around Displayed View Fields: Views Theme Wizard

info@liberatr.net (Ryan Price) — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 23:00:58 +0000

Question #2 also comes to us via our Facebook forum

Modifying existing views.

Michael Blake (Orlando, FL) wrote on Jan 24, 2008 at 12:08 PM.

I'm working on an existing Drupal application that has a custom Content Type. This includes some custom fields. When I change a custom field, such as add markup before and after it, This does not appear in my views. I think it's because my Views have been exported.

However if I change the .php files in the themes directory directly on the server, I get what I want. My question is , if I go about it this way, can someone else come along export a view and erase my changes? Or do I need to re-export every time I make a change?

Thanks.