Work

Drupal Level: Beginner-Intermediate

Email notifications are the glitter of community sites: very few people passionately like them, but you'll never get rid of them. Probably the most typical use case on a Drupal site is to send an email notification to let a node's author know that someone's commented on their node. I just spent the good part of an afternoon setting this up on a Drupal 7 site, and thought I'd pass along some time saving tips.

I usually like what Ted Dziuba has to say but his rant, The Most Important Concept in Systems Design, missed the mark on a few points and ultimately misunderstands the problem on a fundamental level. Go read Ted's article if you haven't already, then we'll jump into some counterarguments and finally why the whole rant is misguided.

Ready?

1. Using Solr to Search a Database

Given the following Drupal code:

and assuming that dummy_column doesn't exist in the users table, what is printed? Here's a hint from the php manual:

mysql_affected_rows()
Returns the number of affected rows on success, and -1 if the last query failed.

If you said "-1" like me, you're wrong (at least some of the time). The code above will return "1" if you have watchdog enabled.

I just read Adam Klienberg's Mashable post, Why Every Brand Needs an Open API for Developers, and there was one good piece of advice in the whole thing: "Before you grab for that shiny object, ask yourself what you’re really trying to accomplish and how best to make that happen."

Ever get emails from people using Outlook/Exchange and have to squint to see what it says when using mail.app? Close mail.app, hop over to the terminal and do this:

Start up mail.app and boom, readable email.

Drupal's files directory can get enormous, and it's best not to keep it in version control. Here's a way to use Apache's proxy module to point your local environment directly to your dev/live site's files directory so you don't have to download it.

In your httpd.conf:

When you reply to someone on a mailing list, your mail software will populate the "To:" address one of two ways: either to the person who wrote the post you're replying to, or to the entire list. This depends on how the list is set up.

There is a very simple way to determine if you're replying to a person or to the whole list (which might be bad if you're giving out your rates). Follow these three simple steps to avoid failing at mailing lists:

1) Read a message.