Drupal CheckDrupal quick tips and tricks before going live!

When developping a module, we often use some commonly used PHP functions. As you may not know Drupal provides some overrides for these functions. They are often related to strings, they have the same name as their PHP native equivalent except that they are prefixed with drupal_. Here is a list of PHP functions you should replace with its Drupal equivalent:

• Replace strlen() with drupal_strlen()
• Replace strtoupper() with drupal_strtoupper()
• Replace strtolower() with drupal_strtolower()
• Replace ucfirst() with drupal_ucfirst()
• Replace substr() with drupal_substr()
• Replace eval() with drupal_eval()
• Replace clone with drupal_clone()

For more on this, you should read includes/unicode.inc and includes/common.inc.

Having an .htaccess file is a pain regarding performances. Apache needs to read it on every single request (the page, every image, CSS files, JS files, etc.).

It is strongly recommended to move rules defined in Drupal .htaccess file in your Apache global configuration or in your vhost configuration file. This way all rules are only loaded 1 time, during Apache start.

To achieve this, just copy/paste your .htaccess content in your Apache server configuration file and don't forget to surround it by the directory where your Drupal install resides.

Note that we added AllowOverride None to prevent Drupal .htaccess to be read by Apache.

Check for syntaxe error:

$ apachectl configtest

And restart Apache:

$ apachectl restart

Note that if you are on Plesk, you must use the following command before restarting Apache:

$ /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -u --vhost-name=example.com

Cron is a deamon which triggers certain actions (cron jobs) at configured times. Windows has an equivalent system called Task Scheduler. Calling cron.php at regular intervals will allow, amongst others, the indexation of content the content and to check for updates.

Setting up a cron job under a *nix system is fairly easy.

1. Create or edit a crontab by typing in a terminal crontab -e
2. Assuming that you have one of the following programs on your system, add one of the following line to trigger a request to cron.php every hour:
   • 0 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -O - -q -t 1 http://example.com/cron.php
   • 0 * * * *  /usr/bin/lynx -source http://example.com/cron.php
   • 0 * * * * curl --silent --compressed http://example.com/cron.php
3. Save and exit your editor.

Setting up cron jobs on Windows is almost as easy! See Resources below.

Drupal logs information about cron jobs. Once you have configured it, you should see entries in your logs (Administer > Reports > Status report and Administer > Reports > Recent log entries) indicating the status of the related tasks.

There are a number of settings for contact forms that are easy to miss, since they aren't readily visible on the site. After you are sure that all the settings are right, you should also submit a test contact on every unique contact form to make sure the email address actually works.

The Site Information settings page at /admin/settings/site-information contains the from address setting.

/admin/build/contact has "To:" addresses and auto-responders, etc.

If you use Webforms, there are similar settings at /admin/settings/webform and per-node at /admin/content/webform (minimally, check the to address in each webform node).

Use full PHP tags

Write:

Don't write:

Semicolons
Write:

Don't write:

No closing tags
When writing a module or customizing your theme template.php, don't use PHP closing tag ?>.

Notice that at the bottom of the following snippet, there is no PHP closing:

By doing this you prevent PHP interpreter to stop and restart on the next source code file. This mean better performance.

It is recommended that websites provide translated versions of their online content in multiple languages for maximum reach. NativeTung - http://www.nativetung.com - is a powerful solution that works with the Drupal CMS platform.

Drupal makes it easy to achieve the following with the NativeTung Globalizer: Globalize --> Optimize --> Analyze your site for increased ROI and reach across the language barrier.

During site development, test content will have to be created so that features can be tested and styled. However, you don't want that test content to go live!

First off, avoid making any content that could potentially be damaging if it accidentally went live. The Devel module can generate content of most types for you automatically, in a way that is clearly test content and won't accidentally offend anyone.

When you are ready to go live, go through the user and content lists to remove anything that shouldn't be available. Also, browse through the entire site structure and look for menu links that shouldn't be appearing.

Sometimes, you won't have content for a section, but for layout or structure reasons it has to be in place. Make the text of the page say something like "Coming Soon" so it's apparent that the page is important, and get it resolved as soon after the live launch as possible.