Tagged with 'drupal'

Drupal Site Improvements and other Housekeeping

• January 17, 2022
• 8 minutes
• drupal, inspiration, tech, website

On the heels of (and riding the wave following) my recent migration of Drupal to a new server host, I decided it was well past time to finally address some things with my Drupal instance that were been bugging me for a long time. Of course, something like this often spirals into its own set of "other" things to fix for the greater good.

Moving a Legacy Drupal Stack to a New Server Host

• January 03, 2022
• 10 minutes
• drupal, inspiration, php, security, sql, tech, website

One of my "end of 2021 break" projects was a planned "lift and shift" of my primary Drupal instance to a fresh, sparkly new web host stack. The stack on which it resided was reaching end of life and for a few other reasons it was time to make the change. In preparation, over the last year or so I've been de-coupling and untangling some of the baggage that had accumulated on the old server and its structure over time. Relatively simple things like straightening out, consolidating, or consistently applying vhost configurations.

Reinstalling reCAPTCHA

• June 21, 2021
• 2 minutes
• automation, drupal, mistakes, security, tech, website

In the last post I wrote about finally cutting off the comments feature due to an abundance of spam.

For about two days, this was successful...

Comments No More

• June 07, 2021
• 2 minutes
• drupal, mistakes, tech, website

Well, the time has come...to shut down post comments. Presumably for good.

When I rebooted the site in Drupal a couple of years back, I'd waffled over whether or not to leave post comments enabled. It seemed like an okay idea, but at the same time would they just become a sea of comment spam? At the time of the site reboot, though, I chose not to maintain an active direct contact ("contact us") form due to other technical limitations at the time. So comments seemed an appropriate balance.

Interesting Log Entries (or, Why To Patch Thy Systems)

• February 24, 2020
• 3 minutes
• tech, website, drupal, inspiration

So far in 2020, I've been keeping a closer eye on the logs of this Drupal site. Back in the day, I used to pore over logs in a sort of 'bender' fashion, presumably as I was bored or something similar. Rarely was something particularly interesting, but it was a good way to figure out and correct some random things. Still is...but it's 2020 and nobody manually looks at logs anymore.

Private Content in Drupal

• February 10, 2020
• 3 minutes
• drupal, website, tech

When I started going down the Drupal road a year ago, with minor delay after delay after delay, one of the many 'dorky' things I wanted to do was port my old "Start Page" to a real platform. See, I've had this flat HTML "Start Page" on my desktop for well over a decade, and it's set as my primary browser homepage.

Time for a Drupal Refresh

• September 30, 2019
• 6 minutes
• drupal, website, tech

So here we are...just over six months into the new Drupal adventure driving the site. Overall I'm much happier with the transition than I'd originally expected, because the general maintenance and upkeep has been pretty much automatic. Scheduled publishing has been a lifesaver, too, because it's a 'set and forget' thing...unless I cross a month's boundary between create and publish dates (more about that in a bit).

I Own You, Drupal View!

• March 11, 2019
• 6 minutes
• drupal, website, tech, mistakes

As I tweeted about in victory a week ago, I managed to finally get my Drupal taxonomy term view(s) to do what I wanted:

I _finally_ managed to get that Drupal taxonomy term view to generate what I want, the way I want it (TL;DR: term value, content filter, and a complex relationship). Only took a few weeks of casual/off-and-on attempts to figure it out! pic.twitter.com/ks7qqZfc73

We Have Liftoff!

• February 18, 2019
• 2 minutes
• website, tech, drupal

Liftoff.

Finally.

Aside from some style tweaks likely to come around, the underlying technical bits I've been ignoring or had on the list to address (looking at you, tag views) are now in place and working as I'd expect. There's a pesky bit I've ended up handling in a more manual sense, at least for the short term: content view by tags.

"Just Reload It"

• February 15, 2019
• 1 minute
• website, mistakes, drupal

I needed to fix a library-level theme item. And since it's been a while since I last made a change like that (this was all before the original switch to the production Drupal instance), I couldn't remember if it involved uninstalling/reinstalling the theme...or simply clearing the cache.

So I chose the heavy-handed option. What could possibly go wrong, right?

WRONG.

I'm certainly glad I don't have a lot of super-customized stuff (other than some titles and custom block layout stuff to place), because I had to do it all over again.

Speak your mind caller, we're on the air!

• February 07, 2019
• 1 minute
• website, drupal

Better late than never?

As of today, the new site is out of maintenance mode and fully live. Hallelujah!

I look at it and see all of its quirks and flaws...and things unfinished. And I let my "good" override my "perfect." For now.

I have lots of random bits to finish tweaking, and surely several more bits to come. There are several styling issues I'd like to tweak (and simplify)--the bane of basing a template off of something else--but generally speaking things are in good working order.

A Minor Delay

• February 04, 2019
• 4 minutes
• website, weather, drupal

What a week it's been. Primarily holed up inside 24/7 as we reached record lows with windchill. Our lowest temp reached -33°F, and with the wind we had would've made it feel like closer to -55°F. Dangerously cold. "Historically" cold. Things (schools, businesses, etc.) wound up being more or less shut down from about Tuesday morning through Thursday afternoon. It's certainly the coldest I could remember for the better part of 25 years (it was the mid-1990's). And it's the only time I ever remember campus being closed for more than a day (two and a half, all told).

The Drupal Learning Curve

• January 28, 2019
• 1 minute
• website, drupal

To embrace the cliché, "The best laid plans of mice and men..."

I was on track.

It was going to happen.

The new site was to be launched as expected.

But my perfectionist side jumped in and started nagging:

If you fix that one thing first...it'll be better.

That function needs some adjustment before you should go live.

Are you sure that style/block/node/view is the right one?

What about all that old stuff currently out of scope for the initial launch?