drupal planet

I recently had a problem with cron on one of my Drupal sites, related to an issue I'll be posting about soon (namely, using Drupal's built-in search with more than 4.5 million entries in the search_index table). When I manually tried running cron, I got a "Cron failed" status message. I checked the log, and it said "Attempting to re-run cron while it is already running."

Apparently, something had messed up (probably due to the fact that I was messing with database tables while cron was working on them) with the previous cron job, and Drupal couldn't start a new cron job anymore. So, with the handy help of Google, I found part of a solution to my cron woes in the Drupal.org forums. Here's what I did to prevent this cron error from happening again:

Recently, an article on Accessibility appeared on Planet Drupal which caught my eye, so I clicked on it. When I was taken to the article page on d7ux.org, the banner across the top of the page caught my eye (as it was intended to do!):

Our UX Principles:

1. Make the most frequent tasks easy and less frequent tasks achievable.
2. Design for the 80%.
3. Privilege the content creator.
4. Make the default settings smart.

I think those four principles, especially numbers one and two, should be the driving force behind any web or product design.

Today I contributed my first 'original' piece of content to Drupal: a handbook page entitled Create a CSS-Only Theme. Since the first time I heard about the Stark theme (a Drupal theme which does nothing but expose all the 'stark' html output of Drupal core), I've been thinking of ways to enable designers to quickly build out unique and beautiful themes for Drupal. In Drupal 7, I think this will be a reality. (And maybe, just maybe, I'll create a theme for inclusion with Drupal 7 in the next few months).

There are only two or three Drupal modules that I have installed on every single Drupal site I set up. At the top of this short list is Global Redirect. There are many reasons for its existence, not the least of which is Search Engine Optimization. Global Redirect does such niceties as remove slashes from the end of URLs and makes sure the home page of the site is the standard home page, and not an alias to it (like /front, or /home-page).