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.

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.

I have been developing a site with the Drupal 7 Organic Groups (OG) module today and I found the need to grab a bunch of users from a group depending on their group role. The first parameter here is the group GID (not the node ID) and the second is an array of role ID's to use.

I had a recent requirement where I needed to temporarily replace the homepage of a website running Drupal with a simple HTML page. I wanted to do this without doing lots of changes to the site templates so I needed a solution that was easy to turn on and off and would still retain the Drupal site as it was. I found the simplest solution was to add a rule to the DirectoryIndex rule in the sites .htaccess file. Here is the rule I used.

When Mike Bell approached me several months ago and said we should do a Drupal camp in the north west I was completely on board with the idea. So for the past few months I have been working with Mike and a group of people from the North West Drupal User Group (NWDUG) to create such an event. The result was DrupalCampNW2012, which was held from Friday 23rd to Sunday 25th November. The venue was the new University of Salford campus buildings in MediaCityUK.