Building custom Web platforms based on Drupal

Two tricks for debugging a Drupal WSoD

Posted Fri, 07/30/2010 - 10:42 by Steve

When working on custom Drupal modules in PHP, one commonly experiences the dreaded White Screen of Death (WSoD). The Drupal community has documented the Drupal WSoD extensively at http://drupal.org/node/158043.

Typically, everything seems fine, and then the Drupal-based web site you are working on (on your local machine) suddenly becomes completely broken, it gives a blank page for any request. Usually I cannot remember even what inconsequential-seeming things I have just changed. The tricks of this post are for directly tracking the down the error with a debugger, by watching it occur. [There is an even better method for this example, described at the end of this post.]

CTC's changing mission statement

Posted Sun, 07/25/2010 - 12:37 by Steve

As you may have noticed, I recently honed the 'mission statement' for Cronen-Townsend Consulting from "Building custom Web architecture with Drupal" to "Building custom Web platforms based on Drupal". Here is the story behind the change.

Loading large MySQL databases on a shared Web host

Posted Thu, 07/08/2010 - 11:56 by Steve

Writing a blog post about loading large databases on a shared host has been in the back of my mind for almost a year. It all started when I wanted to put a replica of MTTProNetwork.com on the web, for testing purposes. Then my client could do testing herself and only instruct me to go live with the changes when she was certain nothing had broken. (Note: As of this writing these changes are not yet live, for external reasons).

Give Apture a try at crotown.com

Posted Tue, 07/06/2010 - 20:40 by Steve

Here is a little post to help you try Apture searches. This is going to be easy since I have Apture 2.0 installed on this very web site.

Suppose you are reading my previous post and you see the phrase "Having Apture integration built-in to a site's infrastructure lowers the barrier to trying it out" and you are wondering what exactly the term infrastructure means. So, highlight it (select it).

Apture Part I: Introduction

Posted Thu, 07/01/2010 - 20:07 by Steve

Building an OpenPublish (2.0)-based site has introduced me to Apture, a technology that is built into each OpenPublish install. (My recent post "My first Impression of OpenPublish: 10 Joys" gives a tiny introduction to Apture.)

Having Apture integration built-in to a site's infrastructure lowers the barrier to trying it out, for sure. All a site developer has to do is surf to apture.com, get an API key, and enter the key into the appropriate configuration page on the OpenPublish site. Then they are ready to experiment.

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