Tobby :
The concept of passing variables by reference or value isn't new to seasoned PHP developers; but often, newer developers aren't as familiar with this concept. Simply put: "by reference" means that you are passing the pointer (memory address) of a variable, while "by value" means you are copying the contents of a variable.
Tobby :
On Wednesday at DrupalCon London, I gave a session called "Slick Data Sharding: How to Develop Scalable Data Applications With Drupal". As the title suggests, the session dealt with different ways you can use sharding to scale your site and make certain parts of it more manageable.
Tobby :
With 1,750 attendees, DrupalCon London is (not surprisingly) Europe's largest DrupalCon ever. In fact, attendance was expanded in the final weeks leading up to the conference as a result of the continually growing waiting list. Additional space was procured to make this happen.
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CapitalCamp was held this past weekend in Washington, DC. We had more than 320 people show up with more than 45 sessions offered by Drupalers from around the US. In case you missed CapitalCamp or couldn't attend our sessions, we have all of the slides from Phase2 sessions available here.
Tobby :
With Field API being part of core as of Drupal 7.0, creating custom fields just became a lot easier than they were in Drupal 6.x. Suppose you need to create a compound field, which consists of several different form elements (a select and several text fields). You can now have a basic compound field in three basic steps.
Tobby :
Drupal 7, which officially drops 7.0 on January 5, 2011, represents a huge leap over previous versions of Drupal as a development framework.
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When building a site in Drupal (or any content management system, really), there are often concerns about how the site will perform. It's fairly easy to take measures to reduce the impact of anonymous traffic on server resources (cacheing, using CDNs, etc). However, much of what Drupal offers is the ability for users to interact with the site far beyond that of a traditional static site. So now you have a complete site built, and you're sure it can handle your anonymous traffic, and you want to test how well your site will perform when users log in and start doing things (such as leaving comments).
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Most folks realize what the "cascading" part of Cascading Style Sheets means for styling Web pages. However, some of the inner workings of CSS specificity are lost on many of them. Especially when it comes to those maddening CSS selectors that should be taking effect, but aren't.
Tobby :
Sometimes, the node data that you want is not exposed to Views in the way that you want. Computed Field is a module that, with a little bit of raw PHP code, can help you bridge those gaps.
Tobby :
When I switched to a Mac recently, one of the things I loved about it was the underlying Unix shell. One of the most frequent things I do in a day is connect to a web server over SSH to do routine things (set permissions, edit a file, remove something, etc.). One annoying detail, however small, is that the username on my Mac is different than the various usernames I have on the servers I visit frequently.
