HornCologne.com - Now wearing pants to work.

Separating your files from Drupal's, and simplifying upgrades

Drupal's developers are constantly fixing bugs and striving to make our Drupal installations as safe as possible - there have been 6 security updates of the 5.x and 6.x branches so far in 2008. If you have several sites, the maintenance work can really cut into your time.

I'd like to share with you a little trick I use in my server setup to streamline the upgrade process when a new core release is available. It not only makes core updates quicker and safer to implement, it also leaves the previous version ready to use on my server in case there are problems with the new Drupal core version.

My setup involves keeping the sites directory outside of the main Drupal installation and using symlinks to tell Drupal where it is. This saves me the step of copying the directory from one Drupal installation to the next when upgrading, which can be time consuming and a potential source of problems on a content-rich site.

Following two incredible Open Source Con experiences in the last three weeks - frOScon in St. Augustin Germany and the DrupalCon in Szeged Hungary - I have been feeling incredibly positive. I feel that I found what really matters to me in the FOSS world and probably the world at large ... I felt strong moments of epiphany in Szeged on this ...

It is all about community. Community, bringing people together to cooperate, working towards common goals and ideals, this is what makes us strong and successful in the Drupal community and what can make us strong elsewhere in life.

A couple of questions came up in our users group get together last night and I thought I should probably post the answers here again for everyone to see.

Well, happy holidays people!

Edit: Note the quality difference between the first and the second image. Although I uploaded both of them from the same large source jpg file using IMCE, the Image Toolkit settings are different. It turns out that Drupal's out of the box, standard compression quality setting (using php's GD2 image toolkit) is 75%.

The first one was scaled using the 75% setting and it gave me a bunch of ugly jpeg artifacts (especially in the red area), yuck!

So I wanted one of those nice "tag clouds" of key words from my site. No problem! Drupal has the Tagadelic module. Once downloaded and unzipped to my /sites/all/modules folder, module activated, I was ready to go! ... Right? Well, no. This thing is so simple, no one seems to have documented the on switch ... I found a lot of code samples for various interesting implementations. I found its settings in my Drupal installation, but no how-to.

Images on the contact page! Always tricky getting the Drupal contact page to look like the rest of the site, but I found a nice workaround for simple themes.