Drupal

I want to share the solution for a problem I (and it seems others) have had with the Drupal xmlsitemap module. The problem results in zero nodes being indexed in the sitemap which, of course, is an undesired result because the purpose of xmlsitemap is to reliably inform search engines of the nodes on your site so they can more easily index your site. Telling the search engine "I have no nodes" is a kiss of death in terms of getting traffic, that is until the search engine spiders your site and finds everything that way. But they don't spider sites every day.

In the Drupal community there's a paradigm that every time you hack core you kill a kitten. And who would want to kill a kittens? The point is that any time you hack core (modify the Drupal core files) it becomes a nightmare to forward-migrate your changes as Drupal core is updated. The Drupal team does routinely update Drupal (about every 2 months) and it's best to keep your Drupal installation up-to-date especially as many of the fixes are for security bugs.

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.

An earlier blog post (see references below) discussed a website node type that I frequently use. One purpose for the website node type is to build "resources" web pages. The "resources" page is an old practice on the Web where a site might host a resources page listing useful sites. These resources pages can be a gold mine of information for users, but I suppose it can be a pain to maintain if the page is a static page you have to remember to edit to add a new resource link.

For several years I've used a CCK content type named 'Website'. The purpose has been to simply list links to websites for my reference and others benefit. The traffic on my sites shows that the website links (specifically the taxonomy pages listing the website nodes) are popular and in some cases the most popular part of the sites. In general "resources" pages are an old practice on the web, you'd see a "Resources" page on most sites that's a simple list of links to useful sites.

A good quality taxonomy listing page can act as a really good sitemap. Good sitemap pages are great for internal linking effects that helps visitors browse your site, and coincidentally aids in SEO. Most (?all?) nodes will have taxonomy terms attached to them. Hence it's a pretty good start to aid someone to browse your site. The problem is the core taxonomy module doesn't make good quality listing of taxonomy terms. For instance it ignores the term hierarchy, it doesn't display links to child term pages, etc.

Looking at a colleague's website (organicJar.com) and was jealous over the Feedback button on the side of the page of that website. It's an AJAX'y button at the side, themed so it stands out well over any background content, and plops up a nice form letting visitors give feedback. See the image to the right. It's of course important to get feedback from your visitors, to engage visitors, and perhaps if they have a good experience on your site they'll return again in the future.

It's curious that Drupal 5 Views Recipes is a brand new book, right?

I've been having a headscratcher on a website for awhile and just found what the problem is. PROBLEM: When cron.php is requested, instead of running cron.php it redirects to some page on the site. This means the cron hooks aren't executed because instead some other page gets loaded. Drupal does a lot of maintenance stuff in the cron hooks, so it's bad news if they don't get executed.

Documentation of the normal setup for cron.php: http://drupal.org/cron .. I had done all that, and their troubleshooting section did not cover the problem I had.