Drupal 6

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.

So how do you remove these nodes? Well with quite a simple little module you can intercept the search query and stop certain node types being searched for. Adding a couple of extra functions means that we can add form controls to the advanced search form and the search admin area so that nodes can be selected to be excluded from the search results.

SimpleTest is a great way to test your modules, but it can take a bit of setting up. For every test that is run SimpleTest effectively has a fresh install of Drupal, so if you need to test a particular function you need to have everything in place before you run the test. I was recently testing a migration module that I had written and needed to create nodes with a variety of CCK fields, which is quite common in Drupal site setups. In order to test that a CCK field saves the data for a test you need to do the following in the setUp() method, remember that this all happens before any tests are run.

Simpletest is a Drupal module that I have been using for about a week to unit test a module I have been working on. It is a brilliant and powerful module that every module developer should be using to test their code properly. I did, however, encounter a couple of weird errors that took me a while to fix. So for the benefit of everyone else I thought I would post them here, along with the solutions. These errors are probably things that developers new to Drupal Simpletest will come across, which is why I have labelled them beginner errors.

I just spend the last few minutes looking for the solution to this so I thought that someone else might be able to benefit from it.

Calling the hook_form_alter() hook in your module using just the module name allows you to target all forms in your system, if that's the sort of thing you want to do. For a module called "My Module" this would be called mymodule_form_alter().

The power of hook_form_alter() hook is that it alos allows you to specifically target a form with a specific name within a module. A good example is if you want to alter the search form to add a class, which is a common task. To do this, create a module so that you can add the hook_form_alter() hook to it and then construct the function name in the following way:

A related items block looks at the current content of the page and tries to present the user with a list of items that relate to the current content. Creating a related items block is quite easy, and is a good way of introducing the search module api without having to get to involved in the search module.

Before starting I should point out that there are other related items modules available. These are modules like Related Nodes or Related Items but these modules either aren't released for Drupal 6, or simply don't work in the way I wanted the block to work. I wanted a module that would act with little or no user input.

Whilst creating a view for a Drupal site the other day I created an exposed form but rather than the usual select boxes that get displayed I needed them to be a list of check boxes. Whilst searching about on Google I eventually found this article, which kindly provides a function that will do this. Here is the function in full.

The title tag on the Blog module index page (found at /blog after the module is installed) is by default "Blogs | Sitename", which isn't editable in the backend of Drupal. I've been talking to other Drupal developers and reading forums about the best way to go about changing the title of the blog index page. Ideas ranged from editing or duplicating the blog module (which is bad practice) to installing the String Overrides to provide a quick translation of the string in the title.

These suggestions are either quite poor, or simply overkill for what should be a simple string replacement. There were two methods we decided upon that work quite well and are easy to implement.

1) The first involves creating a page-blog.tpl.php template file and adding a str_replace() function call to replace the word blog from the title of the page. This would look something like this: