Category Archives: Web Development

Drupal Modules

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I recently completed a project for a customer that afforded me the opportunity to dive into Drupal on better terms. On my first introduction to the software several years back (and Joomla for that matter) I determined I would be able to use my cross-browser theming skills more effectively if I chose WordPress as a base CMS.

This time around I was able to spend a considerable chunk of time reading the documentation (especially around the Theming Guide) and examples on other’s sites. Some topics online seemed incomplete so I did end up reviewing some chapters in a few books on Drupal 7 in particular. In my mind it seems like the developers of WordPress and Drupal are migrating toward each other in feature sets, but delivering solutions from different perspectives. WordPress appears to be geared more toward out of the box social publishing, with an easy installer, and an easy updater. It can be pushed in almost any direction, but doesn’t seem to be the goal of the software creators. Drupal on the other hand feels more like a collection of building blocks for a web database. While Drupal has fields, blocks, regions, views, and fine grained permissions with roles… URL aliases require a module to automate their selection. There’s even a module to hook up Filemaker Pro and Drupal.

Back to the modules:

I utilized the following:

For spam free contact forms (almost):

For easy page editing:

For dynamic content:

For development and style:

Mobile WebApp Frameworks

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So I went digging for mobile webapp frameworks, and I found a nice list to investigate at a later time. While I have used iUI in the past, and it worked well for my purposes… I have read a few reasons why you may consider others (CiUI). Also, I seem to think that there would be some obvious advantages (and disadvantages) to using a cross-platform mobile webapp framework like PhoneGap and others.

Here the list I came up with:

I also wonder about any IDE’s out there, like Dashcode from Apple.

Update (2010-08-13). I just found this article: Announcing the jQuery Mobile Project

Once they get up and running, I imagine it will be a serious contender with the others.

Update (2010-08-18). Here’s an article from Mashable about some of the frameworks and libraries talked about above (and others): HOW TO: Make Your Mobile Websites Act More Like Native Apps

Post via script

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I just whipped up some PHP and threw it in the root of a brand new WordPress 2.9.2 install:

<?php
include_once('wp-config.php');
include_once('wp-load.php');
include_once('wp-includes/wp-db.php');
 
$my_post = array();
$my_post['post_title'] = 'My post';
$my_post['post_content'] = 'This is my post.';
$my_post['post_status'] = 'publish';
$my_post['post_author'] = 1;
 
wp_insert_post( $my_post );
?>

Voila. The post appeared when navigating to the .php file.

See: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_insert_post.

For more creativity, get into the database: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wpdb_Class

Databases on 1and1

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After wanting to test WordPress 3.0 on a 1and1 hosting account, I ran into the following issue… the particular setup I was dealing with had only one database available, and it wasn’t MySQL 5, but instead MySQL 4… furthermore, it was a version lower than 4.1.2, which more recent versions of WordPress require as a minimum.

So after doing a bit of research on what others had done, I went about fixing the problem. Interestingly enough, 1and1 could have made some money in this situation if they would allow customers to simply purchase another database to add to their packages, but no, they want an entire upgrade to be purchased.

The first step was to backup the website and database. I ssh’ed into the web host:

username@localhostname:~$ ssh $username@example.com

Then I backed up the database. The command below will dump all of the databases on the host (in this case, only one MySQL 4.x database) into a dated bzip file, in the home directory.

username@remotehostname:~$ mysqldump -C -A -u $databaseUsername -h $databaseHostName -p$databasePassword | bzip2 -cq9 &gt; ~/`date +%F-%I-%M-%p`-db-backup.sql.bz2

Now to backup the site itself (not only in case disaster struck, but this would get a local copy of the sql dump I just made as well). On a local OS X workstation (or Ubuntu, if that suits your tastes) I ran something similar to the following:

username@localhostname:~$ mkdir ~/website_backups
username@localhostname:~$ rsync -avz --exclude="logs" $username@example.com: ~/website_backups/

From there, I was able to log into the 1and1 control panel and delete the existing database. This allowed me to setup a new one, and in particular, choose MySQL 4 or 5 as the type.

Back to the 1and1 hosting account:

username@localhostname:~$ ssh $username@example.com

I uncompressed the sql dump:

username@remotehostname:~$ bunzip2 2010-01-14-01-59-PM-db-backup.sql.bz2

and was greeted with the raw sql in the file, “2010-01-14-01-59-PM-db-backup.sql”. From here it was only a hop skip and a jump away to restoration. It was necessary to edit the sql file in order to have it restore properly to the newly created database that was just created:

username@remotehostname:~$ nano -w 2010-01-14-01-59-PM-db-backup.sql

And I changed the $oldDatabaseName to $newDatabaseName.

--
-- Current Database: `$oldDatabaseName`
--
CREATE DATABASE /*!32312 IF NOT EXISTS*/ `$oldDatabaseName`;
USE `$oldDatabaseName`;

ctrl+o, enter, and ctrl+x, to save the file and exit nano. The sql dump was now ready to restore to the new database.

username@remotehostname:~$ mysql -u $databaseUsername -h $databaseHostName -p$databasePassword $databaseName &lt; 2010-01-14-01-59-PM-db-backup.sql

The only other things to do were to update any existing applications that needed the new database name, username, hostname, and password.

As a note, if you are updating a WordPress install to point to a new database, this info can be changed in the file, wp-config.php.