I finally sat down to understand a recent post by lullabot on Drush 3 remote capabilities. Its taken me a couple of hours to set up, but this will save me hours in drupal updates. Thank you drush project!

My hangs were on setting up the ssh key, which I omitted at first and then realized that it was a requirement for drush. The second hangup I had was to make sure my *.aliases.drushrc.php files were wrapped in <?php ?> tags. Hopefully that helps some one else.

This was a major hang up on my recent project. I thought I would share in hopes of saving someone else sometime. The explanation for the code being this tedious has to do with CCK's database structure. Each field is given its own table, so to avoid costly queries CCK has a database cache. Here is the code. I had to read through several other posts to find this. I'll try to link to those when I get time.

I needed to find a way to have only one settings.php file maintain my database configurations across both my local development and environment and my production server. Here is my solution. Is there a better way?

if($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] == "local.mydomain.com"){
	$db_url = 'mysql://username:password@localhost/databasename';
}
else{
	$db_url = 'mysql://username:password@production/databasename';
}

For one of my recent projects, I had the privelege of learning how to use the Drupal panels module.  I needed a panel that swapped out content based on which page I was on.  Here is how to do it:

I've been keeping documentation on my development life cycle processes.  Just recently, I realized that I could do away with a lot of these little tasks with shell scripts.  Here's a look at one of my "to-do lists" for setting up a Drupal site on my local Apache server.

Symbolic links work kind of like shortcuts in Windows.  I have found a couple of very useful scenarios.  The first is my local development environment.  For Linux users, it is best practice to keep all your files in your user folder.  For me, this is mainly to keep my system directories clean and to make backup of my files easier.  This leads me to my first usage:

1. Managing Development Files for Apache

Greetings.  I just stumbled upon a great resource from the Drupal Twitter feed.  The videos for each session of DrupalCon DC are posted on the DrupalCon DC website.  Check em' out!

I just found this and thought I'd pass it along. Firebug is an extension for the Firefox browser which provides a rich interface for JavaScript debugging among other features. FirePHP is an extension that allows use to leverage Firebug rich interface for PHP debugging. To install FirePHP for Drupal follow the instructions provided by FirePHP HQ.

1. Download and enable devel-module from http://drupal.org/project/devel
2. Create a folder FirePHPCore in the devel-modul-folder (modules/devel)
3. Download the FirePHPCore library from http://www.firephp.org/HQ

In the my experience of Drupal I've found a set of contributed modules that I keep coming back to. The features that they provide are, for the most part, useful on any site. Those modules include the following.

Menus

• Menu Trails - Maintains a breadcrumb based on your menu hierarchy
• DHTML Menus - Quick navigation via js menu


SEO

• Path Auto - Automated and manual URL aliasing