drupal 6

tl;dr: If you want to skip the 'how-to' part and explanation, check out the pix_migrate example Drupal 8 migration module on GitHub.

For a couple years, I wanted to work on my first personal site migration into Drupal 8, for the last Drupal 6 site I had running on my servers. I've run a family photo/audio/video sharing website since 2009, and through the years it has accumulated hundreds of galleries, and over 20,000 media items.

The home page of the Drupal 8 photo sharing website.

Drupal.org has an excellent resource page to help you create a static archive of a Drupal site. The page references tools and techniques to take your dynamically-generated Drupal site and turn it into a static HTML site with all the right resources so you can put the site on mothballs.

From time to time, one of Midwestern Mac's hosted sites is no longer updated (e.g. LOLSaints.com), or the event for which the site was created has long since passed (e.g. the 2014 DrupalCamp STL site).

I though I'd document my own workflow for converting typical Drupal 6 and 7 sites to static HTML to be served up on a simple Apache or Nginx web server without PHP, MySQL, or any other special software, since I do a few special things to preserve the original URL alias structure, keep CSS, JS and images in order, and make sure redirections still work properly.

...there's a site for that.

I just found out about SimplyTest.me today, and it allows you to, well, simply test any Drupal.org-hosted module, theme, or distribution in seconds.

No longer do you need to spin up (or maintain) a live website locally (which usually takes an extra minute or two—at least) just to check out a module or make sure a theme or distribution fits your needs before using it on a live or development site.

Instead of simply getting a screen shot or trying a theme on a demo site, you get a full Drupal website set up and configured with the module/theme/distro (as well as it's dependencies), so you can play with it to your heart's content (for 30 minutes if you don't have an account on the site, an hour if you do).

I was inspired today to get XHProf working on my Mac, using MAMP PRO 2.0.5/PHP 5.3.6, after reading @Dave Reid's tweet. Since I'm not leaving for DrupalCon until tomorrow, what else could I do today? There's an excellent article on Lullabot that will help you get 85% of the way towards having XHProf up and running on your Mac, working with your Drupal sites, but there are a few missing pieces and little tips that will help you get XHProf fully-armed and operational.

Ooh, pretty visualizations!

This morning, I was presented with quite the conundrum: one of my servers suddently started having about 4x the normal MySQL traffic it would have in a morning, and I had no indication as to why this was happening; traffic to the sites on the server was steady (no spikes), and I couldn't find any problems with any of the sites.

However, after inspecting the Apache (httpd) error logs for the Drupal 6 sites, I found a ton of PHP warnings on almost all the sites. Something like the following:

I haven't seen much about this feature yet, so I figured I'd put it through its paces and share what I found. WYSIWYG editing on iOS devices is finally here! For a long time, contentEditable support has been lacking on iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches, and it's been slightly annoying, as the only way to add richly-formatted text on these devices was doing a two-step through finding the carat characters and writing the HTML yourself.

Plus, some WYSIWYG editors (like TinyMCE) simply disabled the WYSIWYG from attaching to a textarea if it detected an iOS device. No longer, however: I've tested CKEditor (latest nightly) and TinyMCE (latest nightly), and both work perfectly (surprisingly well, in fact!) on the iPad running iOS 5 beta 6:

Now that I've released a Drupal 6 backport of what I originally wrote as a Drupal 7 module, I figured I would write a little bit in the way of introducing one of the simpler, and more user-friendly ways of controlling spam in Drupal (as opposed to other also-helpful methods, like Mollom, CAPTCHA, etc.).

I'd like to thank Flocknote for giving me the development time to work on this module, as we needed something like it for the new 'version 3' launch of www.flocknote.com.

With the awesome new #states implementation in Drupal 7, and for form usability in general, it's often good to be able to selectively, or completely, disable form autocompletion for your users. One example I just encountered was a form that has two fields that are alternatively shown or hidden depending on the value of a checkbox earlier in the form. However, Google Chrome, in its infinite wisdom, was autofilling the hidden field, which shouldn't have a value if hidden, so I had to set the input's 'autocomplete' value to 'off.'

For simple textfields, here's how you could do that in a hook_form_alter() (in this example, I was disabling autocomplete on the user registration form's email field):

For a while (earlier in my Drupal career), I was avoiding adding imagefield-attached images to nodes that appeared in my search results, because I remember the first time I tried doing so, I was still quite confused by the way drupal handled search results theming.

Well, after another crack at it, I finally have a nice, performant way of displaying images from nodes added via imagefields (or in drupal 7, image fields) inline with search results, and it didn't require much work at all!

The image above shows inline images for LOLSaints.com, a site which uses Midwestern Mac's Hosted Apache Solr search service to return results quickly and allows faceting, etc. using the excellent Apache Solr Search Integration module. But the technique I'm using works equally well with built-in (but slower) Drupal core search module's results.

[UPDATE: Here is a much simpler method for editing a user's roles.]

I thought there might be some sort of API function that allows me to add a user role to a user object by the role id (rid), but after looking at user_save() and some other information around the Drupal universe (like this thread), it looks like it's not as easy as I'd hoped. Definitely not like node_save(), where you just modify the node object, save it, and you're done!

I wrote this helper function that you could stick in your own custom module (tested with Drupal 7), which lets you add roles as simply as:

  custom_add_role_to_user($user->uid, 'role name here');

Here's the function: