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dylan's picture

Mechanizing Git bisect: Bug hunting for the lazy

by Dylan Tack, Web Developer

Git bisect is a powerful automated tool for searching deep into a project's history. Instead of searching for relevant commit messages (git log) or patches (git log -S), bisect actually allows you to run a functional test on each revision until the first bad commit is identified. (Okay, it doesn't test every revision, it performs a binary search, which results in at most log2(N) tests. This allows a relatively large history to be searched quickly.) The test can be done interactively, with the human performing each check, or mechanically if you can supply a testing script. Randy Fay has done a nice screencast on the interactive method; this post will instead focus on mechanizing the process. For an example, let's look at a core Drupal bug that impacts this very site: #812990: Search page title changes to Home. For the moment, we'll pretend the cause of this bug isn't already known, and hunt it with git-bisect. Read More…

dylan's picture

Running Drupal Secure Pages behind a proxy

by Dylan Tack, Web Developer

If you plan to use the securepages module behind a proxy that terminates SSL, there are some additional server configuration steps you need to take. In order to detect what the protocol is in use, securepages tests the value of $_SERVER['HTTPS']. Out of the box, this merely reflects the immediate connection to your proxy. If this protocol differs from that used by the original client, then securepages can't work (the most likely outcome is a redirect loop). To resolve this, you'll need to ask your proxy to send the X-Forwarded-Proto header. While you're free to use any header label you choose, X-Forwarded-Proto seems to have become the de facto standard. Read More…

joaquin's picture

How to Decide Between Wordpress & Drupal

by Joaquin Lippincott, President

Wordpress is great - and so is Drupal. They are different platforms and should be selected for different projects depending on the needs. So how do you make the choice? Here are a few questions you should ask yourself: Read More…

vosechu's picture

What's in a framework, experiences from Rails and Drupal

by Chuck Vose, Web Developer

I've now been working professionally in Drupal for a year and have learned a lot about it; I have some patches into contrib but I've not really done much with core other than some simpletests I was too shy to commit at Drupalcon and some comments trying to help people out on d.o. Prior to my stint as Drupal programmer I was a hardcore Ruby on Rails developer for about 4 years. Over the last two years in particular I've learned a lot about frameworks and I'd like to share an observation about which framework feels right to me for which situations and why. Read More…

scott's picture

Semantic Views is Awesome

by Scott Vandehey, CSS Ninja

Like any Drupal themer, I've done my share of grumbling about the frequently ridiculous level of nested divs with dozens of classes. I'd heard some people mention a module called Semantic Views, but I never really understood what it was for until I found this video. If you don't understand what the big deal is either, take the four minutes to watch. It's a total "ah-ha!" moment. I'm happy to say that I just used Semantic Views for the first time on a client site, and it's just as awesome as everyone says. It saved me a ton of work and let me get exactly the markup I wanted, even while working around Chuck's nested views. Read More…

dylan's picture

A JMeter test plan for Drupal

by Dylan Tack, Web Developer

Last week, I wrote about graphing JMeter results with Matplotlib. Let's take a closer look at the actual Drupal test plan. This plan was adapted from Jacob Singh's test and has five different thread groups: Anonymous browsing, Authenticated browsing, Editing a node, Search, and Login and view user page. The revised test plan is available for download. Read More…

vosechu's picture

Nesting Views like a Mecha-Eagle

by Chuck Vose, Web Developer

As you have probably figured out, I love views. I love teasing out little features that are completely buried and obscure. Nesting Views is one of my favorite new travesties; not sure if it's ready for Drupal for Evil, but it's certainly not kosher. If birds can nest, why can't I? image by Benjamin Verdonck, reported by apartmenttherapy.com Read More…

vosechu's picture

Making your clients love Drupal's menu system as much as I love candy

by Chuck Vose, Web Developer

NOTE: Apologies for the gap, I said I would post on Monday but well, I decided to get married instead. So there. You might be saying to yourself, "So Chuck, D7UX is all well and good right, but I'm running D6 right now. How can your wisdom possibly enhance my life and vitality?" Well, you're in luck friend, for my limited stints into D7 have left me craving more of that optimized UX goodness and blogging is a side-effect of learning for me. Today, not in fact monday like I had promised, not like my promise really means anything to my adoring audience anyways, I want to talk about getting users around Drupal in the fastest way possible. In addition, I want to talk about some roles and permissions that will result in less training and less support calls. Read More…

joaquin's picture

Hey Google! All your base are belong to Facebook...

by Joaquin Lippincott, President

As a long time Google Ad user, I've been a big fan of the ability to submit ads on Google. It's (relatively) easy and allows you to tailor your ads based on : Search term Location (Geographically) Time All of this is great, right? Compared to everything out there it was really great and very affordable. But that was close to 2006. Fast forward to 2010 and the rates aren't so affordable anymore. In the space for web development key words, I've seen costs go from as little as $0.50 per click to more than $4.00 per click for top billing for the same keywords. That's 800% of what costs used to be. With that kind of rate, I found I needed to turn down and then turn off Google Ads. Read More…

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