During DrupalCampNW 2012 last November the company we hired to record the sessions also spent some time interviewing the people who attended. From these interviews we were able to create three videos, two from the main event and one about what Drupal means to different people. These videos are now complete so I'm posting them here so everyone can see. I think they came out really well.

I was recently working on a module that contained a content type as a feature. When the module was enabled the hook_install() hook set up a collection of taxonomy terms which were used within the content type as a field. Whilst testing this out I realised that although the terms were installed correctly the default value of the field changed depending on which system the module was installed on. The reason for this was that the term ID was being used to pull out the default term from the database, which is the normal behaviour in Drupal.

I'm just letting all my neurons cool down after a fantastic Drupal Camp at City University, London. These Drupal camps are getting bigger, better, and much more frequent in a really, feely, organic way. They never feel like there is a sponsor driven sales push to use this service or that, moreover, it genuinely does feel like a community of like minded people, groups of people, willingly sharing their knowledge, ideas, and enthusiasm in what it is they are doing, using, or believe in.

Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is an opcode and variable cache for PHP. When you run a PHP script it is first compiled into a series of opcodes which are then used by the Zend engine to run the program before being discarded. APC sits between the source files and the Zend engine and will stop the opcodes generated during the PHP script execution being thrown away. This means that when you run a PHP script a second time the work done in generating the opcodes has already been done and the script will execute faster.

I often find that after recreating a Drupal site locally to do some testing that I have left CSS and JS aggregation turned on. This can be turned off easily enough via the performance page, but this often breaks the flow of what I am doing. As an alternative I use Drush to reset the values via the command line.

The Drush command variable-set can be used to alter any value in the variable table. The two values needed for CSS and JavaScript aggregation are preprocess_css and preprocess_js. To turn these values of we just set them to 0 like this.

Organic Groups (OG) in Drupal 7 has a role based permission system that works on a group by group basis. This permissions system works separately to the main Drupal permission system, which can cause a couple of issues. For example, if you want to give a group role access to give other users roles then you'll need to give them the 'Administer groups' permission. The downside of this is that it overrides Drupal's core permissions to do with node deletion and allows the role to delete the group.