2BlueSolutions Developer Blog

Editing or creating a Drupal site where the search form stopped working or never worked in the first place? Enable 'Search' module in   http://sitename.com/ ?q=admin/module See   ?q=admin/settings/search   to see how many items are left to index.  If you see that the site says 0% indexed, 177 items to go or something along those lines, run cron. Run 'cron.php' from your browser like  http://www. sitename .com/cron.php Check   ?q=admin/settings/search   again to see the status of search module. That's it. Something I never thought to do while making the site, so hopefully this post helps someone else out.

I was recently using a theme that had a secondary posts section and I wanted to organize the categories of posts independently of each other. Thankfully, I stumbled across this plugin for Wordpress that is just an all-around great plugin:   Category Order and Taxonomy Terms Order . After installation, it creates a quick little Ajax driven drag and drop category sorter under your posts menu.

Previously, I posted a quick .htaccess tip which you can find here:  http://2bluesolutions.blogspot.ca/2012/07/apache-modrewrite-all-files-temporarily.html As an addendum, I have recently discovered this great site: http://htaccessredirect.net/index.php This site will generate an .htaccess file for you based on a whole bunch of variables you can enter into the form. It's probably not as complex as some of you would need, but those of us making complex .htaccess files don't need this site, right? It's a great tool for creating fast and simple .htaccess file for handling a bunch of redirections. http://htaccessredirect.net/index.php

For example, say you want to put up a coming soon page on a Drupal site and you don't want to edit the "Down for Maintenance" file, you can just quickly alter the .htaccess file. This example involved a Drupal site where I had FTP access, but not admin access to the installation. So, the quickest option was to whip up a coming soon page, upload the file as index.html and then put up a new .htaccess file (backing up the original). The .htaccess file should look like this: <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule !^/index.html$ /index.html [R=302] </IfModule>

A quick and easy way to load specific CSS based on the orientation of the viewing device (ie. iPad / iPhone). Just put the following in your header and create the appropriate stylesheets. <link href="portrait.css" media="all and (orientation:portrait)" rel="stylesheet"></link> <link href="landscape.css" media="all and (orientation:landscape)" rel="stylesheet"></link>

Read an article via Smashing Magazine regarding a new editor called Brackets  and decided to give it at try. Initial reaction is that it is actually a pretty nice editor for Web Developers.  It's more of a true IDE than Notepad++ with a nice listing of open files on the left. So, why use Brackets?  Well, I do like the IDE type layout.  Though, I do know that there is a file listing component in Notepad++. I suppose the best that Brackets has to offer now is the live CSS editing.  Linked with Google Chrome, Brackets can live update any changes to your CSS files immediately in the Chrome browser.  It's pretty nifty to see in action. Give it a try:   Brackets

I just learned that one of my favourite (well, my only) backup utility for Wordpress isn't in the Wordpress Plugin Repository anymore for some reason unknown even to the author of the utility.  For those of you looking for it somewhere, you can find it on his site here:  http://ezpzsolutions.net/ocb-wp-plugin/ Or you can find it here:   http://2bluesolutions.ca/files/ezpz-one-click-backup-latest.zip Why do I like this plugin so much?  It's simple, easy to install and setup, and even includes a scheduling program that will email you with a direct link to the backup when it has created a new one.  Also, it's free which is always a huge plus.  Restoring from a backup is also dirt easy as well.  It really reminds me a lot of the Joomla backup tool I use .