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Quick tip: When /user and many other menu entries are missing

Fri, 12/10/2010 - 18:37 — Farzan

Recently, a friend of mine contacted me regarding his Drupal website; all website contents were missing and he even could not log into the website and check the situation.
He was in a great hurry and I checked the website shortly. Except the homepage -which looked to be set on /node- every other links were not accessible.
I asked him about any change in code and settings or anything unusual. He replied that he has not changed anything; just the fact that the web server was not fully responsive at the time of problem.

Chaos tool suite review: Dependents

Sat, 07/03/2010 - 21:25 — Farzan

It's been a long time that I want to write about Ctools. I have two good reasons: They are extremely useful -God bless Earl Miles, and it is very short on documentation.

Ctools have many tools to offer and I am going to explain some of them, one at a time. This time, I want to show you how to use Dependent tool: It make form items appear and disappear based upon the selections in another item.

Concept

When using Dependent tool, you have two kind of fields:

  • One field that it's selected value is observed by other fields.
  • One or more fields that are depended on the first field and appear or disappear upon the selected value of it.

Field that others are depended on its value can be one of these types: Radios, Checkbox and Select. Dependent fields can be anything, even markups.

How to create a new node in Drupal programatically

Tue, 05/18/2010 - 19:04 — Farzan

Here is an old story: How to create a node in Drupal programatically. This is my version.

Basics

First, if you have a general knowledge of a node structure, it would be much easier for you to create nodes by code. If you do not have such knowledge, don't worry; I will show you in this article.

First of all, a node is a container, containing data of your Story or Page etc. In code, it is represented as a PHP Object. All we do is creating an object and putting our data in it:

  1. global $user;
  2.  
  3. // Create new object.
  4. $node = new stdClass();
  5.  
  6. // Set desired data and metadata as members in object.
  7. $node->type = 'page';
  8. $node->uid = $user->uid;
  9. $node->title = 'node title';
  10. $node->body = 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit...';
  11.  
  12. // Save the node
  13. node_save($node);

Note that if you don't set some values -Status or Promote to front page for example, they will be initialized by default values in Content type settings. If you want to overrode those values, set them as well:

  1. global $user;
  2.  
  3. $node = new stdClass();
  4. $node->type = 'page';
  5. $node->uid = $user->uid;
  6. $node->title = 'node title';
  7. $node->body = 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit...';
  8.  
  9. $node->status = 0; // Not published
  10. $node->promote = 1; // Promote to front page
  11. $node->sticky = 1; // Sticky on top of list
  12.  
  13. node_save($node);

Here is a good place to have a look at a node structure. When you pass your node to function node_save(), it adds the necessary values to it and then save it. This function accepts your node as a refrenced variable, therefore after saving the node, you can have a look at it and see the complete structure of your new node using functions print_f() or dpm(). function dpm() is one of many useful utility functions in module Devel. If you have not installed Devel yet, I strongly recommend that do it right now! It is a must for every Drupal developer.

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