Category Archives: Drupal

Is your Drupal data safe ?

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There are many modules available for Drupal to back-up your Drupal site, but I’ve always felt that in addition to backups on your server the best (and more secure) way to get the data was directly from the database – and the best place to store that data is OFF/AWAY from your server and on your local PC hard drive, included in your local PC data backup scheme. Keeping the data locally will not only protect you from catastrophic server issues, but will also protect you from the occasional “my hosting company locked me out of my account!” issues that I read about all the time.

Don’t forget that in addition to the MySQL data, you also need your Drupal files which can easily be downloaded/backed-up using FTP.

If you have never done a MySQL data export, don’t fear, it’s spelled out at the Drupal.org website: Export Drupal Data

For all you WordPress users, all this applies to you too if you value your blog.

WWE Moves To Drupal

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World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc (WWE.COM) has recently made the move from a custom CMS to Drupal – proving that if Drupal can handle WWE’s 200 million page-views per month, it can handle pretty much anything.

The project to move from WWE’s previous custom CMS to Drupal took over a year and makes extensive use of CCK, Panels, and Views.  The rich media of the site is all built on web-standards, meaning that even fans using iPhones and iPads can enjoy all the slideshows and videos of the “entertainers” pretending to wrestle, fight, and carry on with drama.

If you are curious about just how far you can push Drupal, have a look at the new WWE.COM website.  At least you know the website isn’t all faked.

 

Drupal: Integrating Your Site With Facebook

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After avoiding it for years, I’ve finally added some Facebook integration with the website. I don’t know why I avoided Facebook this long. I’m not sure if thought Facebook was just a ‘fad’ or I just didn’t think it would help in any way or maybe I thought that the integration would be too difficult. So far it turns out I was wrong on just about all counts.

It’s fairly easy to integrate things like Facebook “Like” buttons, “Facepiles”, etc. There are several Drupal Modules for Facebook to choose from. Which one you decide on depends on what you want to do, and compatibility with your existing modules – I started with the Facebook Social plugins integration module which is pretty simple to setup and gives you instructions for creating your Facebook App ID, etc. I had Facebook Social plugins up and running in just a few minutes – so much for being difficult.

It’s hardly been 48 hours since I built a “Facebook Page” for the website, and we’ve already gotten a few “likes”. Also, by adding the Facebook “Like” button to all of our pages I am now able to see how many times those pages had been ‘shared’ or “liked” over the years. I was shocked to see many pages that had been shared or liked hundreds of times! Facebook also has a great little analytics package called “Insights“, that once setup provides a webmaster with some startling demographics information about the people visiting your page.

 

Perhaps the most surprising of all are the results of the Facebook advertising campaign I setup. I was able to buy a CPM ad for only a few cents per 1,000 views. Even more surprising is that according to Adsense & Google Analytics, the CTR and earnings for visitors coming from Facebook is incredibility high! Man.. I was really wrong about that one..

As far as Facebook being a ‘fad’.. This is the one I was most wrong about. Over 600million Facebook members and still growing proves me more wrong every day!

If you haven’t setup a Facebook presence or at least tried/testing running a Facebook ad campaign I recommend you give it a try. You can see/follow/”Like” our new Facebook page (above) or my “public” Facebook profile (using my middle name instead of last name) here:

My Personal Page |

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Drupal: Fix Attempting to re-run cron while it is already running

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Drupal LogoMy Drupal installs have been running pretty darn smooth for a year or two. Seems like since I upgraded from Drupal 5x to Drupal 6x, a lot of those little “issues” went away. But lately I’ve been seeing this message more and more often:
Attempting to re-run cron while it is already running

The first time I saw the “cron is already running” error I went into a Googlebating frenzy to try and resolve the issue. I found (too) many suggestions like changing cron semaphores in the Drupal system table, running MySQL repairs, and throwing shells at the moon. Finally I came across a comment hidden in a post at Drupal.org that is simple, and for me, has fixed the dreaded ‘Attempting to re-run cron while it is already running’ error message 100% of the time.

To fix the Attempting to re-run cron while it is already running error:
are you ready for this? Just Clear your cache!
Admin|Site Configuration|Performance|(scroll down) – and hit the Clear Cached Data button .. boom – problem solved..