Drupal

Drupal has two ways in which to allow users to download files, these are private and public.

With public the files are open for anyone to download and Drupal is not involved in the download process. This means that no statistics are recorded or permissions used when downloading the file. Each file is referenced by name.

Private file access means that Drupal is run every time a file is downloaded. This allows the download to be recorded and a permissions check run to make sure that the user in question is allowed to access the file. Each file is referenced by a path that can be completely different from the original filename.

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:

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.

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. I tried clearing the Drupal cache and disabling some modules but this didn't appear to do anything, or simply broke the site. Searching the internet for this problem yielded very few results, so I eventually had to track the problem down myself.