code

Batch Revert Views

16 February 2011
Drupal code tips

Isn't it a pain when you have dozens of Views setup and they are all marked as "overridden" because you just pulled in an updated feature file from somewhere. Features doesn't always notice when the Views on your site aren't up to date.

The following snippet (which you should use with caution) will batch "delete" (or Revert, once the view is in code) all Views which are marked as Overridden. This took a few seconds to run on our development machine.

Entity Encode Text Using PHP

07 February 2011
code programming

Ever needed to Entity Encode a block of text (maybe to partially protect it from spam bots or just hide/obfuscate the content?). I did. It’s pretty easy.

If it’s just basic Entity Encoding, you can always use htmlentities - however this only does the “important” characters such as quotes, ampersands and angle brackets.

Thingy Ma Jig - Now brought to you by Drupal 7

16 January 2011
Drupal How to code tips

So, Drupal 7 is out. Have you heard? It was a bit of a quiet launch really. ;-)

When it came to upgrading by blog, I decided (eventually) that I needed to do a cleanup as the Database had been upgraded from 4.7, to 5 and then to 6 - with many modules added and removed in between. New year, new drupal, new blog (kinda)!

Fixing Dos Line Endings

25 November 2010
tips linux How to geek code Drupal

Sometimes, when you're running coder on a module, you'll get a lot of errors complaining about Windows line endings. This is because you should set your editor to use Unix Line endings to be consistent with all developers. See the Drupal Coding Standards for more details.

Below is a handy bash script which will help you batch convert many files from DOS to Unix line endings.

MySQL: How to upper-case words

30 September 2010
tips programming mysql How to code

 I recently needed to clean up a MySQL Table which contained people's names. Upon searching the MySQL commands, I was surprised to find there was no equivalent of PHP's ucfirst or ucwords. There were commands to convert entire strings into upper or lower case, but not just the first letter.

Backing up a Drupal Database: Redux

27 April 2009
tip linux How to geek Drupal code bash

Back in November last year, I wrote a script which handled backing up a drupal database. There were quite a few comments and I've taken some on board and developed the script on a little further to be more "generic".

One of the main complaints/suggestions about my previous snippet was the hard coded nature of it. The follow script offers far more configuration through the command line itself.

Backing up a Drupal Database

26 November 2008
tip linux How to geek Drupal code bash

I was just dumping a database using mysqldump and I noticed that tables such as cache (and its cousins cache_page, cache_menu, etc), sessions and watchdog can be pretty big and are also not often essential for backing up. I mean, when you restore your web site do you really care about restoring people's logged in sessions from when the backup took place? I can understand maybe keeping watchdog; but then again should you lose your site you would probably lose it several hours after the backup so would miss out on any relevant watchdog notices.

Anywho… I did a mysqdump for a large database for a website I maintain and the dump came out at 400Mb. I then spent a few minutes cobling together a small script which would do a mysqldump but had some pre-programmed Regular Expressions to match specific groups of tables which it would only dump the structure for (ie, no data). After running this script, the SQL dump was only 220Mb. Much better! It also runs considerable quicker too and will cause less table locking.

So - the script?