#! code

I recently noticed a strange little issue with Drupal 7 that seemed like either an oversight or a decision I don't agree with. Essentially, when a node is created with a menu item in place the extended flag on the menu will not be set, but the control is also not available on the menu admin page. This means that when you are trying to print out a hierarchical menu structure you need to create the page, go into the menu admin area, access the menu, click on edit to access the menu item and change the setting there.

A common practice when creating sites in Drupal is to create different node types for different purposes. Sometimes these node types can be functionality based rather than content based and are used for creating a rotating banner or something similar. A side effect of this is that you will then see these nodes appearing in search results, which can cause some confusing results to be displayed.

I recently had some trouble with a Drupal 6 site I was updating. I wanted to create a local working copy of the site to test so I downloaded the files and backed up the database, but for some reason I couldn't get the site to run. In every browser I tried I would get "page cannot be displayed" or "host unresponsive". These messages were basically telling me that something on the site was causing it to fall over before it ever got around to producing any HTML, and so the browsers were treating it as best they could.

Filters are used in Drupal to change the content of the text of a node when it is viewed. The important thing to note is that Drupal filters should never alter the actual content of the node itself. Instead, when a node is saved it stores the output of the filter in the cache_filter table and displays this content the next time the node is viewed. This is useful because it doesn't mess about with the original text, and it speeds up the displaying of the node by running the filters once, rather than every time the node is loaded.