Category: PHP

Settings to get Drupal 7 working on Hostgator

Posted on December 24, 2010 by ellen

At the moment, Hostgator’s default PHP version is v.5.2.4, although version 5.3 is available. Drupal 7 requires 5.3, so until they make it the default, it is necessary to manually tell Drupal where to find PHP v. 5.3. Do this by adding

Action application/x-hg-php53 /cgi-sys/php53
AddType application/x-hg-php53 .php

to an .htaccess file located in the public_html directory of your site. If Drupal is not at the root of your site, and you don’t want to change the entire site over, it works just as well to modify the .htaccess file in the Drupal directory.

An .htaccess file is just a text file named “.htacess” which can contain many different types of directives understood by the apache server.

Drupal YUI Rich Text Editor: Set maximum image dimensions on uploaded images

Posted on September 26, 2010 by ellen

The search for the perfect WYSIWYG text editor in Drupal goes on. The best I’ve seen yet is YUI Rich Text Editor, but it still has some serious browser incompatibilities and usability problems. One significant is that there is nothing stopping users from upload a huge image, and not resizing it down using the provided resizing tools.

Now that just most cameras produce images of enormous resolution, users in my Drupal sites’ users often upload gigantic photos, which remain splashed across the entire layout until I get around to fixing them. I finally got tired of correcting users’ posts for them and fixed the CSS so it will never happen again.

Add phpMyAdmin to your Web Platform Installer IIS setup

Posted on July 9, 2010 by ellen

One key item that seems to be inexplicably missing from Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer is some kind of front end like phpMyAdmin for administering mySQL databases. It installs one for SQL Server Express, but not for mySQL. Fortunately, it’s only a 5 minute job to install phpMyAdmin yourself.

After running the Microsoft Web Platform Installer and installing whatever PHP/mySQL applications you want to run, download and decompress a copy of the latest version of phpMyAdmin from this page. Drop the folder containing the phpMyAdmin files into the inetpubwwwroot directory on your IIS server. Shorten the name of the folder to “phpmyadmin” or something appropriate when typing a URL.

Microsoft Web Platform installer: Drupal on IIS, the easy way.

Posted on July 9, 2010 by ellen

If you work with Windows servers, then you have probably gotten used to doing without the many opensource web applications taken for granted outside the enterprise environment. Drupal, WordPress, phpBB, Moodle, etc. were all out of reach. Yes, it was possible to install PHP and mySQL, but it took a level of commitment and dogged troubleshooting persistence that few people are willing to undertake.

Well, now you can have your enterprise cake and your opensource software too! Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer, introduced a couple of years ago, makes the process of installing all those LAMP-style web apps easy. When I say easy, I really mean easy! It just works!

Gallery site suddenly stops working: check file permissions

Posted on November 30, 2009 by ellen

Today I found that a Menalto Gallery v.2.3 site I run had simply stopped working. I had made no changes in weeks, so this was peculiar. Browsing to the front page brought up only the

fatal error: class ‘OAuthCommonHooks’ not found

Posted on August 17, 2009 by ellen

On installing the OAuth module in a Drupal site, this error appeared: fatal error: class ‘OAuthCommonHooks’ not found in [path] Fatal error: Class ‘OAuthCommonHooks’ not found in /drupal-6.13/sites/all/modules/oauth_common/oauth_common.module on line 58 Apparently you can fix

Drupal: increase upload file size limit

Posted on August 17, 2009 by ellen

By default, Drupal enforces file-size limits on uploads. Although there is a place in Drupal’s File Upload settings to alter the maximum file sizes (/admin/settings/uploads), chances are your PHP settings limit file size to 2MB

Drupal not recognizing update

Posted on March 4, 2009 by ellen

As if the current crop of virus warnings and financial data-stealing Trojans weren’t enough, mandatory security updates just came out for both Movable Type and Drupal. The Movable Type upgrade went without incident but Drupal

Our complete set of customized site files for new dotproject customizers

Posted on February 14, 2009 by ellen

For all the dotProject newbies out there, this is the kind of thing I wish I’d had when I got started – it would have saved me a lot of time. I’m posting all the files for a dotproject site I manage, since it seems it may help people get started in customizing dotProject.

Download Files (5.8 mb zip file)

To find my changes, search across all the files for the phrases “ellen added” or “ellen changed” in various comments.

One note of caution! I am not an expert in php or dotproject so the fact that something has been done doesn’t necessarily mean it is done in the best way, nor even that works. But these files should help to get you going. This is presented “as is” and I will not fix things for you or document things beyond what is in the articles I post here (Browse all my dotProject posts)

Drupal module Feed Aggregator escapes HTML tags in feeds

Posted on January 18, 2009 by ellen

Drupal’s Feed aggregator has a problem displaying some of the escaped tags in Google Alerts Feeds. For example, see the screenshot below:

The fix is to alter the code in
modules/aggregator/aggregator.module

Search for

 function aggregator_save_item($edit)

In both the UPDATE statement and the INSERT statement:

replace $edit['title']

with

strip_tags($edit['title'])