Tips and Tricks

How to display user's fullname in Drupal

By default, Drupal will have only username and password for such a user. Whenever username is displayed, it will try to call a theme funtion namely username by specified $node. If you want to display user's fullname instead, you have to customize a little bit.

How to list nodes in multiple taxonomies in Drupal using Subquery

I found a good question regarding PHP snippet for Drupal. Usually, we will list nodes in multiple taxonomies using OR operator. However, you might need to list using AND operator which nodes must be in all specified taxonomies instead. It is not easy to do so using plain SQL. The straightforward solution is to use subquery.

How to manually sort table in Drupal

Drupal provides powerful and flexible built-in table sort functionality. However, it will only work with database query through standard db_query() and pager_query(). In many cases, rows are fetched from external system, e.g., mailbox. We may add a few lines to get the same behavior.

How to compile PHP for Plesk

I would like to enable mbstring and/or iconv in PHP running on Plesk. This is a painful process. I have to compile and install lots of packages. The most important thing is the configure. Note that this host is FreeBSD.

How to force fsck in Ubuntu

Most of you may try to let servers run as long as possible to maximize availability in term of uptime. That is good. However, there is at least a side-effect originated by the nature of file system where as it is necessary to clean up something important. For example, ext2/ext3 should be checked for every 30 mounted or 180 days. It is fine to reboot a server once a year as long as the file system is not read/write too often, especially when there is very low free space. That's why you should force to run fsck sometimes.

How to redirect url permanently in Apache

One day you may want to rename your domain name to a new one due to inappropriate use of the old domain. However, the old domain is still valid and still valuable for search engines. It is possible to redirect all existing urls to the new domain gracefully. For example, http://abc.com/node/8 to http://def.com/node/8. Whenever one tries to access http://abc.com/node/8, webbrowser will be automatically redirected to http://def.com/node/8. This behavior also applies to search engines.

The trick is to use mod_rewrite in Apache HTTP Server