php

Assignment: Create a highly customized page/node in Drupal and:

• Be able to develop the page/node using our text editor of choice and avoid the time-consuming and not-intended-to-be-developer friendly Drupal node-editing interface
• Optionally be able to decide whether to have the page/node be editable by the via the Drupal UI or not.

Sure, we could do this by creating a page-node-xx.tpl.php template file (where 'xx' is the node id number), but that's just a major hassle later on when updating/theming things and it won't give us the flexibility of being able to let an end-user edit things.

In this case, the thing to do is to create a file called my-file.php (.php because we want our text-editor to still recognize it correctly), put it in our theme folder, check the PHP input filter on the node itself, and then place this code in a node:

What this will do is look for the file you placed inside your theme folder called "my-file.php" and render it. Which means that you make changes directly to my-file.php without having to touch the node itself and thus simply refresh your node anytime you make changes to the file.

This method has the advantage of:

• Saving a ton of time and headaches of dealing with the Drupal interface and doing without your favorite code editing tool.
• After you're finished you'll have the option of choosing to replace the include-code with the final code inside your file so that an end-user can edit it within UI...
• ...or you can just keep things like this and be able to do cool things like check the code into version control, which means that you basically get many of the benefits of a tpl.php file without the cost of one.

Enjoy and happy coding. :-)

After spending 3 days trying to get Elipse PDT and the Zend debugger working on Mac OS X, my nerves were very frayed, indeed. Apparently, there has been an ongoing problem with the Zend debugger not stopping at breakpoints on Mac Intel machines...something that has plagued Eclipse through 3 different PHP extensions. (don't even get me started on how crazy it is that Eclipse has seen three completely separate PHP plugins within less than a year)

Recently a client we helped get started with Drupal and admin their backend systems for, had their first 100,000+ unique-visitors day.

Everything went well, the lessons we've learned over the years of Drupal performance tuning (Part I, Part II), combined with well planned Apache/MySQL/PHP settings provided an event-free day (other than watching the hit counter go through the roof!).

Showing that it was no fluke, the site has had numerous 100,000+ days since then and has settled into an average of 40-50,000 unique views a day / 1,200,000-1,500,000 visitors a month.

If you have a Drupal site that you need to prepare for high traffic and high availability, give us a shout. We can help you handle it.