Web Development

Fixing update_sql() to accept parameters

Submitted by Damien on Fri, 05/29/2009 - 4:27pm

A pretty simple yet cool feature of 's function is that you can pass in parameters that will make it automatically adjust the query to correctly escape the arguments. This is one of the simple security features in Drupal as it will properly escape the string to avoid , and just simply safe you hassle. Good stuff!

Managing Drupal Views, the proper way

Submitted by Damien on Tue, 05/26/2009 - 11:58pm

One of the most powerful and most useful modules on is . With one screen you can build custom pages & blocks based around your content, select the exact fields you need, add filters and arguments, and relatively easily customize the display, and that's just scratching the surface. In fact, Views is so flexible that I've built sites which have 90% of their architecture based solely around taxonomies and Views.

Make a special module for each Drupal site

Submitted by Damien on Tue, 05/26/2009 - 11:20pm

One thing I've learned from my development time is that every site should have a new module created for it to house all of the small custom functions and things you'll use. Common things I've added to these per-site modules include:

The future of blogging with Drupal via XML-RPC?

Submitted by Damien on Fri, 04/24/2009 - 6:49am

One of the benefits of having a content management engine that supports -based content creation is that you can write your content in more usable tools and publish when finished. is one such system and is an amazingly powerful tool in its own right, but you still want to be able to write offline..

Posting to Drupal through XMPRPC / BlogAPI

Submitted by Damien on Mon, 04/20/2009 - 7:13pm

When I migrated my blog from Wordpress to one key thing I still wanted to do was be able to use to post messages from my laptop rather than through the web interface - it can be just easier at times. Thankfully Drupal has a plugin/module built in which does this for you, the BlogAPI module. So I activate the module then try to connect using ecto only to be greeted with the lovely message:

The response from the server did not contain valid data.

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