Transcript

So we're sending out an email 30 days after a person checks out on the site and just asking them, "Hey, do you want to come back? Here is a coupon." This is for a dermatology clinic. And so, maybe they want to reorder a product, like a month later, they might have used it up. That's kind of the use case here.

Few books are as captivating as these 420 pages of hardcore programming knowledge.  You guys can keep your Harry Potter books, give me 420 pages of code snippets, programmer speak, and Drupal and I am set.  All kidding aside, "Drupal 7 Module Development" is an extremely well written and helpful book for anyone jumping into the brave new world of Drupal 7 module development.  While I probably wouldn't recommend the book to someone new to Drupal, the book does an excellent job of not assuming too much beginning knowledge on the part of the reader.  The book starts out with some good introduction to Drupal and all of the core architecture of this complex content management system.  It would be a bit of a whirlwind tour for someone new to Drupal, but depending on your starting knowledge, it could be everything you need.

As Drupal has continued to grow as a system, it seems that we are getting more and more clients who come to us with a site that is halfway setup, and they just need some help with some custom modules or other more technical elements of the site.  Innevitably that leads to them sending us a database and filesystem dump, so we can start developing on their site.  The only problem being that we don't know the password for the admin user, so we are locked out of the site even once we set it up from the datebase and filesystem dump.

Last week one of our clients started marketing a Drupal-driven, web dashboard application we've been secretly building for nine months.  To help their sales person impress clients, I used Camtasia for the Mac (I love that it is so much cheaper than the Windows version - go figure!) and did a video overview of the system.  Then I exported it to the HTML page Camtasia builds since I just needed something quick and dirty.

Search engine optimization (SEO) seems to be the black magic of website design today.  No one talks about it in any depth, and the few that do claim to be experts, all have pretty disjoint opinions on how to brew the right concoction that makes Google happy.  Doing a quick search for "SEO" or "Drupal SEO" on Google will provide a myriad of results and people asking for your money to make your site more visible on search engines, but is the magic formula really that difficult?

It seems like just about everything has a website these days, and because of this, more and more we go to the web for answers to questions instead of books, people, or other sources. It is this shift that makes having a website a no-brainer for most businesses, organizations, or people, but I am amazed today, as I look around the web, at how many websites look like they were created by some high school kid 10 years ago.

Even with the vast number of sites out there using Drupal, the issue of how to migrate code from a development environment to a staging environment and then on the the production environment is a largely untouched and unexplained problem space.  However, I finally found the reason why everything is left so unexplained.  It is because, like most command line things, once you know the right commands it is really simple.  This post is going to discuss two tools that will eliminate all of the problems you might run into: Drush and Ægir.

"Cron run exceeded the time limit and was aborted."

Most of the Drupal posts on this deal with a module that has a problem which causes cron to run for too long. I want to have cron run long intentionally.

For a client's site we need to do some fairly major calculations during the nighttime when cron runs. These are going to take well over 30min per cron run.