Mark Jarrell's blog

There are probably about 100 different ways to embed YouTube videos in your Drupal 7 site. Here's one approach that doesn't involve any additional modules. Basically you just add a plain text field that allows users to paste in the URL for the video they're wanting to add and then do some creative coding within the theme layer.

If you have a public-facing development site that you don't want search engines to stumble upon and start indexing, here's a method that you can try on your Drupal site (or any other Apache site for that matter). Go through the usual process of adding your normal robots.txt file to your site, but then create an alternate robots.txt file (let's call it "robots-dev.txt") that's specific to the dev site and tells search engines NOT to index your content. Here are the contents of the text file:


#
# robots.txt
#

Have you ever wanted to add a simple Javascript print button to a webform so that users could print out all of their entered data? I had a need to do this today for a coworker. I thought about working up a custom module, trying to build a custom template file for the form that contained the additional button, but instead decided to store it as simply a "markup" component/question.

Basically you just add in the following code:

Just in case anyone else wants a printer-friendly version before Tuesday's conference. Thank you PosteRazor for helping me split up this big image into multiple pages!

Yes, I've got the iPhone app, but I wanted a paper copy to have on the plane ride too. :)

File: 

DIWD 2011 Printable Schedule

I was recently talked into continuing to use my Discover card by one of their sales associates. I haven't found a great resource online yet that lists the national chain stores that do not accept the Discover credit card, so I thought I'd make a list myself. Perhaps others will comment and add more to this list in order to make a resource for others who are searching Google for a list such as this.

I was lucky enough to be able to give another presentation at this year's excellent DrupalCamp Nashville, sponsored by Music City Networks, 7 Sudos, Tropo, The Tennessean, and a number of other splendid companies. This year, I decided to present on the Austin Peay State University mobile website that I've been building for the past few months along with the help of interns Jason Bell, Brian Barbour, APSU staff Rollow Welch, Terry Damron, Bill Persinger, and Ryan Forsythe.

File: 

building-mobile-drupal-site.pdf

FleetThought is now building conference sites for interested businesses. Do you run a local conference and need to implement a conference site to bring together presenters, organizers, and attendees? Building a conference website by yourself is extremely difficult and there are a lot of moving parts. We've built multiple conference sites and actively participated in more than 10 regional and local conferences for libraries, non-profits, and programming-related conferences. Benefit from our experience and let us assist you with setting up your conference site!

Although CCK automatically does some basic validation on your fields that you add to your Drupal content types, there are some cases where you'd like to do some additional validation for your site. One use case that I ran into recently was a basic text field that was being used to house hyperlinks for one of my websites. The text field had already been in place and working perfectly for months. Rather than do something drastic like replacing the field altogether with a field provided by the "Link" module, I decided to do a hook_form_alter to add in my own custom validation function.

An important part of keeping a Drupal site up and running smoothly is to keep your modules up-to-date. Although this is most important in relation to security releases for your modules, it's also important to upgrade to new versions of modules in order to take advantage of new features.  The new version of the Webform module (version 3.x), for example, includes integration with the Mollom SPAM-blocking service/module. If you have a site that's still running Webform 2.x, you aren't able to use Mollom's ability to protect your forms.

I was recently trying to figure out exactly how long my users' sessions were lasting on an existing Drupal site that I had built. Generally it seemed like users were remaining logged in for an extremely lengthy period of time. I did some research and finally discovered that this setting is actually configured in the default settings.php file that ships with Drupal. There's a line in the settings file that initially reads:

ini_set('session.cookie_lifetime',  2000000);