snippets

A common need I run into with a ton of Drupal sites and Views is searching/filtering content based on multiple fields. For example, a lot of people would like to search for content using either the Title or the Body for a particular content type.

There are two primary solutions offered for this situation, but they both have downsides or are overly complex, in my opinion:

• Use the Computed Field module to create yet another field stored in the database, combining the two (or more) fields you want to search, then expose a filter for that field instead of both of the individual fields. (I don't like this because it duplicates content/storage, and involves an extra module to do so).
• Use the Views Filters Populate to invisibly populate a second field that you've added to a views OR group (using Views OR in Views 2.x, or the built-in AND/OR functionality in Views 3.x). (This module is slightly limited in that you can only work with strings, and again, it involves an extra module).

Instead of using an extra module, I simply do the following to achieve a multi-field search:

For a complex Drupal node form I've been working on for flocknote, I have a relatively complicated image switching functionality that lets people change an imagefield on the node (either when creating a new one or editing an existing node), and once the imagefield is changed, some custom jQuery code will grab that image and display it in the form, for a very WYSWIYG-like experience (the node looks almost exactly the same when editing/adding as it does once the user saves the node).

One problem is that images can be arbitrarily high (though they're resized to 600px wide), and I can't easily get the height of the image through any traditional means. If I were grabbing an already-saved imagefield image, I could throw the image height into the JS settings for the page. However, getting a dynamically-added image's height/width values is surprisingly tricky using JavaScript, at least if you take a look around the web and try using many people's suggestions (which work great if the image was already loaded with the page's content, but not if the image is dynamically added, or if the image hasn't yet loaded on the page.

I recently needed to display some ping/server statistics on a website using PHP. The simplest way to do something like this is to use the built-in linux utility ping, and then parse the results. Instead of doing complex regex with the entirety of ping's output, though, I also used a couple other built-in linux utilities to get just what I needed.

Here's how I got just the response time of a given IP address:

The above script will ping the given IP address, and simply pull out the response time in milliseconds. You can further parse the response time to just be the numeric value by running it through substr($ping_time[0], 5).

Most of the time, Drupal's convention of printing comments and the comment form inside the node template (node.tpl.php) is desirable, and doesn't cause any headaches.

However, I've had a few cases where I wanted to either put comments and the comment form in another place on the page, and in the most recent case, I asked around to see what people recommended for moving comments out of the normal rendering method. I found a few mentions of using Panels, and also noticed the Commentsblock module that does something like this using Views.

However, I just wanted to grab the normal comment information, and stick it directly into a block, and put that block somewhere else. I didn't want Views' overhead, or to have to re-theme and tweak things in Views, since I already have a firm grasp of comment rendering and form theming with the core comment display.

So, I set out to do something similar to this comment on drupal.org (which was also suggested by Jimajamma on Drupal Answers).

After reading through a ton of documentation posts and forum topics for Amazon SES about this issue, I finally found this post about the string list format that helped me be able to send an email with Amazon SES's sendmail API to multiple recipients.

Every way I tried getting this working, I was receiving errors like InvalidParameter for the sender, Unexpected list element termination for the error code, etc.

apachebench is an excellent performance and load-testing tool for any website, and Drupal-based sites are no exception. A lot of Drupal sites, though, need to be measured not only under heavy anonymous traffic load (users who aren't logged in), but also under heavy authenticated-user load.

Drupal.org has some good tips for ab testing, but the details for using ab's '-C' option (notice the capital C... C is for Cookie) are lacking. Basically, if you pass the -C option with a valid session ID/cookie, Drupal will send ab the page as if ab were authenticated.

Instead of constantly going into the database and looking up session IDs and such nonsense, I have a simple script, which is quite revised from the 2008-era script originally from 2bits that worked with Drupal 5, which will give you the proper ab commands for stress-testing your Drupal site under authenticated user load. Simply copy the attached script (source pasted below) to your site's docroot, and run the command from the command line as follows: