Alex Moreno

How important is having a database optimized. Doing some "basic" optimizations like clearing the cache, runing the Drupal cron and a couple of things more, your database can change from having 4 GB to just around 200MB... incredible? Not at all, the importance of maintenance tasks :-)

Which tasks? Mainly:

Some interesting links that I have found this week.

steps:

download review tools,

1. coder: http://drupal.org/project/coder

2. php code sniffer: http://drupal.org/node/1419988

3. dreditor: http://drupal.org/project/dreditor

4. paraviewsh (automated tool): http://drupal.org/project/pareviewsh

Debugging cron issues and errors is one of the most tricky things in Drupal. If you are dealing with a big site, with people adding nodes, inserting content which you can't allways force to be commited in the right way, and things like that, it is not unusual to find a cron broken by some "misterious" node.

Well, it is quite easy to find this "misterious" offender, just logging the cron activity. How, very easy, with my new module "cron_killing_finder".

Sometimes you need to upload files to, for example, validate an affiliate with whom you want to start to work.

The problem, is that these affiliate files need to be "clean", no template, no theme, just the code or validation string which they send.

The solution can be very complicated, like creating a new theme just for a group or a contect of pages... or as simple as creating a node with the string which we need and executing a php code with an exit command. Something like this:

valicationStringLikeUZasdBNf6asdfT2asdfafjpdadf===58QYg==

Sometimes in Drupal you need to get the fields for a particular content types. 

"$type = 'mytype';

$fields = content_fields();

$type_fields = array();

foreach ($fields as $field_name => $field_data)

{

  if ($field_data['type_name'] == $type)

  {

    $type_fields[$field_name] = $field_data;

  }

}"

in drupal7 is easier, since we have a direct function:

field_info_instances($entity_type = NULL, $bundle_name = NULL)

very simple:

        global $theme_key;

      echo $theme_key;

if we need more information, we can use this:

       $themes = list_themes();

       $theme_object = $themes[$theme_key];

        // print all the object fields

       var_dump($theme_object);

via http://drupal.org/node/46961#comment-88354

Download the apachesolr module from drupal.org, and put it in sites/all/modules:

http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr

download solr-php-client, version 22

http://code.google.com/p/solr-php-client/downloads/list

and uncompress it in the apachesolr module directory.

Ready to activate the module, but we will did not installed the Apache server, so the module will not work.

Paginating the results in Drupal is incredible incredible easy. You just have to remember the two "magic functions":

• pager_query($sql, $count);
• theme('pager',10);

pager_query substitutes the typical db_query. Just something like that: 

• // $resource = db_query($sql);  // -> old sentence without pager
• $resource = pager_query($sql, $count); // -> pager

Then, we simple come back to the function that is called by our hook_menu, and we change:

Docs are not allways the best part in programming languages, frameworks or CMS. Sometimes you try to make something and you find problems, just because poor documentation.

It's my situation just now. I was trying to create tpl.php files for a module, and it is really easy... if you follow exactly all the steps.

First, hook_menu:

/**

 * Implements hook_menu().

 */

function mymodule_menu() {

$items = array();

/*