Articles

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| 2 min read
Boost is a Drupal module that accelerates the performance of a site by efficient caching of pages. It can be enabled for all pages other than the ones which need to show constantly updating data (for example, a captcha box). NOTE: If you are looking on how to install and configure Boost for your Drupal website, go here: How to install and configure Boost caching module to speed up performance on your Drupal 6 site. Here we list some methods for testing the Boost implementation on a Drupal website:
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| 3 min read
On one of the maintenance projects we got we came across a page that used to take around 11 seconds to load. The page was a views listing for users. We were able to speed up the page load times from around 11 seconds to under 3 seconds by taking out just the distinct option used in the view. The following was the select query that was originally generated from the view with the time logged by views in the preview panel.
Zyxware default image2
| 4 min read
In every operating system, there are a lot of tasks that need to be scheduled to run at a particular time - some, very often (as in, every 5 minutes), and some, less (like, once every month). For a quick example, you might want to run a temporary files deletion operation at midnight each day - this is where you need to write a cron job.Crontab and Cron jobs are Linux’s version of a complete job scheduling system.Let us see these in detail.
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| 5 min read
Generating SSH keys and using them for connecting to SSH servers is a straightforward process on Linux. But for Windows users, Windows does not provide any support for the SSH protocol by default. There is no SSH client that comes by default on Windows. Let alone generating keys.
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| 7 min read
Unlike proprietary operating systems that comes up with a rudimentary set of applications, Ubuntu and GNU/Linux in general has thousands of freely available Free Software applications available for installation directly from the Internet. These applications are usually available from software archives referred to as repositories. The official Ubuntu repositories contain more than 30000 applications. Having the Ubuntu repositories on DVD can be useful for those users who don't have access to the Internet or has only limited connectivity from the machine where they have their Ubuntu installed but have access from somewhere else to download the repository. Here is a step by step instruction on how to download the complete Ubuntu repositories and build your own set of Ubuntu Repository DVDs. For those who would like to get it done the easy way you can buy a set of Ubuntu Repository DVDs via our RequestCD program
Zyxware default image1
| 2 min read
Ubuntu 12.04 comes with a bug that it will not mount the cdrom on proper path and that prevents installation of applications from the Ubuntu Repositories even if you add the repositories via apt-cdrom successfully. Whenever you try to install applications you'll get an error message like E: Unable to stat the mount point /media/cdrom/ - stat (2: No such file or directory) Here is how to fix this problem:
Zyxware default image2
| 2 min read
Boost is a module that allows for static caching on a Drupal site for improving performance for anonymous users. You can read more about how to install and configure boost here. Boost comes with a boost crawler that can crawl your site and refresh the boost cache. Here is a simple script that can be used to refresh the boost cache without enabling the boost crawler.
Zyxware default image4
| 2 min read
Boost is a module in Drupal that enables file based static page caching in Drupal. When an anonymous user visits a page for the first time in a Boost-enabled Drupal site, the page will get stored as a static html file in a cache folder. When the next anonymous user visits the same page the htaccess rules created by Boost will serve the static file cached in the cache folder instead of bootstrapping drupal for generating the page. This saves a lot of processor usage and would help even entry level hosting servers serve reasonably good volume of traffic. Here is how you can install and configure Boost in a Drupal 6 site.
Zyxware default image4
| 1 min read
We recently saw this error on a Drupal 6 site that had not been updated for quite a while."warning: call_user_func_array() expects parameter 2 to be array, string given in sites/all/modules/contrib/views/views.module" means what it says. call_user_func_array expects the second parameter to be an array whereas a string was given instead. You can troubleshoot problems like this by writing a bit of debug code before the line where the error is reported.
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| 3 min read
As the world of internet grows day to day, the more educated and ever-wanting userbase now needs more data asynchronously. They don’t like to wait or load another page to see their data. In such situations we developers need to use more and more AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)) in the development of websites. Using AJAX in your web-development workflow is not that much difficult as you think. There is already a wide range of famous ajax libraries that make handling asynchronous requests easy for us.
Zyxware default image4
| 2 min read
Apache allows you to protect contents of specific directories in your website or the whole website from unauthorized access using a mechanism called httpd password protection. During development of new sites the partially built sites are protected from unauthorized access using httpd authentication. This could sometimes interfere with testing of integration with third party services that might expect some of your URLs to be accessible without authentication. Here is how you can exclude a given file or directory from httpd authentication
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| 2 min read
Drupal’s Nice Menus Module provides a highly customizable and nice-looking dropdown menu for Drupal websites. To allow maximum customizability, it includes a CSS file and a javascript file where you can try out your own recipes. The following steps should help you make nice looking drop down menus for your Drupal website using the Nice Menus module:
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| 2 min read
Boundary Value analysis is one of the techniques used in software testing which involves designing of test cases to contain values at the edges, or in other words, it includes values in the minimum and maximum conditions. For testing a Drupal site, these conditions are addressed in the test cases so that we can capture and resolve them earlier, since such extreme ends commonly cause software faults. Boundary value analysis is a black box testing technique.
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| 2 min read
Have you ever wondered how that cool site you saw last day had those cool interfaces and you wished your Drupal site could have the same coolness? jQueryUI is your saviour here. jQueryUI is one of the most popular JavaScript libraries out there in the world of web development. jQueryUI allows you to add very cool user interface elements to your website without much effort.
Zyxware default image1
| 2 min read
Solution for CKEditor not working in a Drupal 6 site. One day, all of a sudden we found out that the CKEditor was not working on our Drupal 6 site. It had literally disappeared from our website taking the whole text area on the edit page with it. This meant that we could not create any articles as long as the CKEditor was not working. On seeing this, the first thoughts that flashed through our head was to either update the module or apply a patch believing that the CKEditor module had crashed. However our fears were unfounded and the solution turned out to be more simple than we expected.
Zyxware default image1
| 3 min read
Developing a Drupal website is a complicated and long process. You have to check whether all the design and functionalities meet with the client specifications. And before the site going to be live you have to check certain criteria.These checklists describes the criteria that should be tested before a site going to be live.
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| 6 min read
Software Testing is the process carried out during software development, so as to ensure and verify that the product, be it a simple program or an entire Drupal site, developed has all the desired features, performs as expected by the customers and meets all their requirements. It also the ensures the robustness of the product. Here is the Levels of Testing in a Drupal Development Workflow.
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| 3 min read
Acer has released the price lists of its Aspire One Netbooks for the month of June 2012. The prices are given as follows.. Model: AOD270-268kk LU.SGA08.012 Expresso Black Price: Rs. 18699.00 Intel® Atom™ processor N2600 (1MB L2 cache, 1.6 GHz)/ Mobile Intel® NM10 Express Chipset / 2 GB DDR3 RAM / 10.1" WSVGA/ No ODD/ 320GB HDD / MultiCard Reader /Blue Tooth/ 3 USB/10-100 LAN / 0.3M WebCam/ 3 x USB Ports /HDMI Port/ Stereo Spks / 6-Cell /Win7Starter
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