I recently wrote a post about setting up a multi-site configuration setup using the Configuration Split module. That post was written after I did research into how to set up configuration splits and use them to create multi-site setups in Drupal. One thing I realised when doing that research was that although it's quite easy to get setup with that kind of setup, it's also easy to get it wrong and create a setup that really doesn't work.

When developing sites in Drupal 7 I found the hook_init() hook was a good way of quickly testing certain things in code. By adding little blocks of code it was possible to build complex SQL queries, inspect internal configuration, or even test complex node interactions.

The Shield module prevents access to a Drupal site by putting a Apache authentication system across the entire website. This means that to access the site you need a username and password.

This is useful in a number of different situations, but I use it most for protecting dev and staging sites from access. It's not the most complex authentication system in the world, but it's enough to prevent the embarrassment caused by having staging sites being spidered by search engines.

I've been using PHP for a number of years and have seen the same things being done with return values from functions over and over again. I have always thought of this as pretty standard, but the more I think about it the less it makes sense. Looking back over my career I am quite sure that a few serious bugs could have been avoided if I had not mixed return types.

Following on from my last post about sorting colors I have been thinking about different ways of sorting colors. I have been looking at interfaces that allow people to select colors and they will quite normally have a band of colors that does look nicely sorted. As it turns out this is perfectly possible to do if the colors are normalised to remove light and dark variations of different colors.