Archive for the 'Drupal' Category

07-02-2011

Drupal Quickstart, VirtualBox, & Error “Runtime error opening…”

I’ve been using the open source virtualization software VirtualBox lately to run my Drupal development environments. I started using image from the Turnkey Linux project, until I discovered a project on Drupal.org called Quickstart. Quickstart is regularly updated and comes pre-configured with a variety of useful tools for Drupal developers, including Drush, XDebug, git, and a whole lot more. It even includes its own Drush plugins that make spinning up new sites a snap.

While Quickstart has been a big productivity boost, VirtualBox sometimes leaves a bit to be desired. In essence, it’s finicky. A lot of the problems seem to be related to the screen, either it will stop resizing properly or appear jumbled.

More recently, I’ve started having problems with the latest 4.0.8 release of VirtualBox that were more troubling. I started getting errors along the lines of:

Runtime error opening 'C:\Users\COMPUTER_NAME\.VirtualBox\Machines\VM_NAME\VM_NAME.xml' for reading: -102 (File not found.).

Once the error appeared, I wasn’t able to start the virtual machine. At first, when I went to check the directory, I saw that the file was gone. I thought I’d lost access to the whole virtual machine because of that missing file. Since the code I’d been working on was in version control outside the image, I eventually decided to use it as an excuse to download the latest version of Quickstart. After a few weeks, a similar error appeared (though a different file had gone missing this time).

That’s when I started to do some searching about the error that I realized the file was there, but had just been renamed. In essence, this forum post explains it all, but in summary, simply copy the FILENAME.xyz-prev file and rename the file to FILENAME.xyz. That fixed the problem for me on two different virtual machines.

Posted by Matt in Drupal, tech | No Comments »

02-04-2009

Drupal 6 Theming Cheat Sheet

Now that Drupal 6 has been out for almost a year, I finally got around to updating my Drupal Theme Developer’s Cheat Sheet accordingly. Since it borrows from the Drupal Handbooks and API documentation, it’s available under the same Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 license.

Please contact me if you’re interested in translating the cheat sheet into another language and would like a copy of the Microsoft Word document used to create it. Also, let me know if you have any corrections or additions that you would like to see included in future revisions.

Posted by Matt in Drupal, cc, learning, tech | 9 Comments »

12-18-2007

Drupal Theme Developer’s Cheat Sheet

UPDATE: I’ve now posted an updated Drupal 6 Theming Cheat Sheet.

The Drupal Handbooks are an exhaustive resource for learning all things Drupal. Unfortunately, sometimes finding just the information you need can be difficult. The Theme Developer’s Guide alone includes 14 sections, most made up of additional sub-sections.

With that in mind, I put together a Drupal Theme Developer’s Cheat Sheet that includes some of the most handy reference information for themers. The cheat sheet is specific to PHPTemplate, the most common theme engine for Drupal. The two page cheat sheet includes information on available variables, file naming conventions, sample code, and more.

If you have any corrections or suggestions for improving the cheat sheet, please leave a comment.

Download the PDF: Drupal Theme Developer’s Cheat Sheet

UPDATE: Horacio Salazar has translated the cheat sheet and posted a Spanish language version on his DrupalMex site.

Posted by Matt in Drupal, learning, tech | 20 Comments »

11-01-2007

45 Screencasts to Get You Kicking Ass with Drupal

I’ve been working a lot with Drupal lately. Drupal is a content management platform that can be difficult to learn, partially because it is so flexible and modular. Though the Drupal learning curve can be steep, the Drupal project founder and leader, Dries Buytaert posted a useful road map for getting you past the “I Kick Ass” threshold with Drupal.

Even with the road map, there’s still the matter of how to learn it all. There are Drupal books, Drupal podcasts, Drupal documentation, Drupal forums, Drupal IRC channels, Drupal groups, Drupal blogs, Drupal mailing lists, and more.

I’ve spent the last year or so developing a variety of Drupal sites both at work and in my off-time. I’m not an expert, but I have learned a lot during that time. For me, the various Drupal screencasts have proven to be one of the easiest ways of picking up Drupal concepts quickly.

Luckily, there are Drupal screencasts for practically every step along the Drupal learning curve, which I’ve collected below. One caveat: because the screencasts are free and produced by a variety of individuals, the quality can vary and some will definitely overlap in what they cover:

Installation and configuration of Drupal core

Node system

Block system

Users, roles and permissions

Installing contributed themes and modules

Upgrading, patching, (security) monitoring

Navigation, menus, taxonomy

Locale and internationalization

Drastically customize front page

see below

Theme and template modifications

Contributing documentation and support

How to Contribute to Drupal (slideshow, not a screencast)

Custom content types and views

Actions and workflows

Theme and module development

jQuery, FormAPI, security audits, performance tuning

Contributing code, designs and patches back to Drupal

More to Come

There are some gaps. For anyone who is interested in creating screencasts, the following topics from Dries’ list could use some more up-to-date coverage: drastically customizing the front page, security monitoring, security audits, performance tuning, locale and internationalization. If you find or create any screencasts covering these or other related Drupal topics, please leave a comment with a link.

This is my first of probably many Drupal-related blog posts. Subscribe to the RSS feed, if you’d like to keep up to date.

Posted by Matt in Drupal, learning, tech | 16 Comments »

MineZone Blog

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly at first.