Troubleshooting Drupal Ad Module

Ads stopped displaying after an emergency server move. After checking the obvious (image paths, module settings, permissions) and finding no problems, it was pretty clear there was a server configuration issue, not a Drupal issue. But where to look?

Drupal Site Search Indexing Fails - One Solution

A lot of hair pulling ensues when a Drupal site’s indexing fails. Without an updated index, the search feature will not work properly. Much has been written on this and the problem is fairly common.

CiviCRM & Drupal for Membership Management

The CiviCRM module for Drupal is a highly configurable, nearly out-of-the-box solution for deployment of a membership registration process. Self-registration can be customized using contribution pages.

Moblogging with WordPress

In a previous article we discussed mobile blogging with Moblog in ExpressionEngine. In WordPress posting via email is not a built-in feature, but we have used the plugin Postie to accomplish this. Once installed, configuration is handled from a tab in the Options section of the WP admin. A cron job or scheduled task (Windows) executes the Postie script and adds the post.

Removing index.php from URLs: WordPress Follow up

In a previous article we discussed rewriting the site URL to remove index.php in ExpressionEngine on Windows IIS. The method uses a free Isapi filter, the Ionic Isapi Rewrite Filter, to accomplish what mod_rewrite would on Apache. Many WordPress users would like to remove index.php as well, and the Ionic filter can do the same thing for WordPress.

ExpressionEngine: Removing index.php on Windows IIS

The engine behind ExpressionEngine is the file index.php. This file appears in the URL in front of the template group name and template name:
xigent.com/dev/index.php/site/article

In some cases you may want to remove index.php from the URL - namely, to make it shorter and cleaner. On Apache, mod_rewrite would accomplish this. But on Windows IIS, the procedure is different. Our preferred method, using the free Ionics ISAPI filter, is fairly simple but does require some server configuration. Below we describe the steps involved.

Using Gmail for SMTP with WordPress

We frequently experience minor issues when configuring PHP applications that require email, like WordPress. Periodically, the client site is on a Windows server, which requires the use of SMTP to send email. On a Linux/Apache server, the PHP mail function is very simple and almost always works with the application out of the box.

In one particular case, for a WordPress installation we wanted to use Gmail as the SMTP server so mail would go directly to a Gmail account. We knew smtp.gmail.com could be used in an email client such as Outlook, but didn’t know about configuring it in WordPress. A quick search led us to this post in the WordPress forums, which describes a pretty simple method for setting smtp.gmail.com as the outgoing server. To get it to work, we had to omit one step, which we describe in this article.

Using SMTP for Email in ExpressionEngine

We often use SMTP to handle email in ExpressionEngine, especially if we’re installing on a Windows server. ExpressionEngine supports PHP Mail, Sendmail, and SMTP. We found that using SMTP with a mail server running qMail requires some changes to the ExpressionEngine EEmail class in the file core.email.php. The problem is that the EEmail class creates what is called a bare LF (line feed). Qmail will reject messages with a bare LF, causing a send failure. Confused? It’s ok - the fix is quite easy.

Mobile Blogging with ExpressionEngine Moblog

For mobile blogging, or updating web site content on the fly, the ability to publish content via email is a must. Easy to use, yet not always easy to implement. The Moblog module in ExpressionEngine is a good solution that’s easy to deploy and customize. Here is a very simple example.