Tech Support Case Studies

Our support team is prepared to deal with any Drupal related problem or question that might arise. Some problems show up more often than others, though, and in those cases it is good to have the solutions at your fingertips.

This recently got added to our growing library of Drupal knowledge, and deals with the problem of running cron efficiently. In the effort to tune PHP to perform well while serving normal web pages, it is possible to set some values in php.ini so low that they are insufficient for running cron.

Tech Support Case Studies

My duties at Acquia include answering the phone when European clients call needing support. Today I helped someone who needed a way for their site users to be able to find the content that they had authored. The recipe I suggested involves making a view that displays all content filtered by a particular user id. By having the view provide a block display you can then put that block on the user's profile page and they always have a place to go to find the latest content that they've created.

In this article I will show you how you can write a tiny bit of code that will reveal new fields and facets for searching with the ApacheSolr module and Acquia Search. Using Acquia Drupal we'll write an example module that takes the file type from CCK file and image fields and makes them into their own search fields. This results in us being able to filter our search results based on file type. This code fulfils the situation where you want, for example, to find a specific post that has a JPEG image, or all of the posts with PDFs that match a particular keyword.

I can hardly wait to go do DrupalCon 2009 in Washington DC. If you’re as excited about DrupalCon as I am, but are having a hard time finding the money you’d need to attend, perhaps you should apply for one of the 20 scholarships that are being awarded. Anybody in financial need can apply:

On January 19 and 20, 2009, in Cologne Germany, Commerce Guys and AF83 will be joining forces to offer Drupal Ubercart training (registration link). Drupal is a leading web content management system, and Ubercart is a full e-Commerce solution and shopping cart that is built on top of Drupal.

Last week Acquia sent me to New Orleans to be a speaker at Lullabot's Do it With Drupal conference. The conference went very well and I gave a presentation about ApacheSolr, and how faceted search will change the way you think about finding things on your site. Since Acquia recently announced that we will be launching a hosted Solr search service even more people have shown interest in ApacheSolr.

What are you doing on January 17th and 18th? Hopefully you'll be coming to DrupalCamp Cologne and hanging out with Drupallers from all over the world! This is the first ever Drupal-specific camp or conference that Germany has ever seen, so it will be quite an event.

Tech Support Case Studies

One of the core services that Acquia offers is support for people building sites with Drupal. "The S-Files" are stories about the day-to-day life of our support team. Each one contains a nugget of Drupal knowledge that helped a customer succeed with Drupal. Enjoy!

"Hello, I installed a new theme on my site but I didn't like it. So I deleted it. Now I can't log into my site and it really looks broken."

Acquia documentation agent Jam* and I will be heading to Denmark this weekend where we'll be geeking out with Scandanavian Drupallers at the first ever DrupalCamp Copenhagen. You will recognize us by our Acquia shirts and our inability to speak Danish. Our mission is to help you upgrade your Drupal 4 or 5 sites to Drupal 6.

There has been a lot of hand waving about the semantic web, RDF, and Drupal. This is good, and it is important for there to be excitement about the possibilities that this opens to us. Now the first concrete plans are being laid and the first patches are being written and evaluated.