Drupal Tutorial

One of the things Drupal does is generate emails for a variety of reasons. For example new account registrations include a step to validate the account, by sending an email containing a validation link. On the large online community website I run, a long-running problem has been that the validation email does not always get delivered. This shows up as a user registration that never gets validated.

The "Path Redirect" module for Drupal 6 (http://drupal.org/project/path_redirect) is an excellent way to set up redirects from one URL to another. This module can be used for any purpose where you want the HTTP request for URL's on a Drupal website to automatically redirect to another URL. For example :-

• you might want to have a nice URL to promote for some excellent product (example.com/excellent-camera) that lands on a merchant website while hiding the complexity of the merchant URL (making sure to include the affiliate link).

Short (or tiny) URL's are great for sharing links on various social media services. Twitter's 140 character limit places a premium on bytes better used for words than URL's, e-mail clients get hinky with long URL's, and so on. It's possible to use services like tinyurl.com or bit.ly to create your short links, but as Drupal users we have a powerful platform at our fingertips. Maybe it can do the short URL natively or maybe it can be programmed to automatically retrieve short URL's from the existing services.

Following on from my blog post the other day, Looking at (and a debugging tip) the Domain module for Drupal, I want to look at one of the gaps in the Domain Access module. Out of the box it does not modify the blocks configuration pages, meaning that out of the box all configured blocks show up for all domains. This is unlikely to be what you want, instead what's likely is to have different blocks for different domains.

Looking at the traffic data google Analytics collects on my web sites I see a high "bounce" rate which means many visitors leave right away. It means they come to the site, then look only at the one page, presumably to go elsewhere. I've been pondering what might be a good way to entice them to stay and look around. After all, my websites exist to instruct people, so the more pages they look at on my sites the more instruction I'm able to impart. Oh, and there's a higher chance they'll click on an ad or something.

I've had a problem with use of RedirectMatch on some of my sites which causes a FAIL in combination with Drupal's reliance on mod_rewrite to provide clean URL's. Over the years I've used different technologies to build sites and on occasion have converted a site built with static web pages into one driven with Drupal. This has meant a web of .htaccess files listing redirects for the old URL into a new URL. The goal is to help your readers continue to access the pages you wrote even when the location (URL) of the page changes.

There's a long standing debate over the content of RSS feeds. For the greatest convenience of your readers the full RSS feed is great, because they can read your articles in their feed aggregator. However as a publisher who needs to earn a living from my writing I only want to publish a teaser so that the reader will feel incentivized to visit my site. For me the feed is a lure to bring people to my site, and I cannot do justice to others' viewpiont.

The core Tracker module is a convenient way to look at recent traffic on a Drupal site. It shows a list of recently posted (or modified) nodes along with useful data items for each node. However with Views 2 there is a more flexible way to implement the same functionality, without enabling another module.

The task is really pretty simple. Just download and enable the Views module, then in the Views configuration interface enable the Tracker view. Yup, coming bundled with the Views module is a predefined view which does every task the Tracker module does.

In two prior blog posts (see the references section below) I've discussed using a website content type to create resources lists. In this post I want to discuss another use, for a kind of footnoting system. You can see it in action below.