If you create a CiviCRM group with, say, 1,000 contacts in it and then go to create a mailing using the same group and it only says it will send it to 750, it's likely because some of those contacts are "on hold." On hold simply means that the system has determined the email address associated with the contact to be not worth sending to (i.e., dead). This could be caused by the emails bouncing for any number of reasons.

To avoid unnecessary continued bouncing, CiviCRM flags them as On Hold and prevents them from being included on future mailings.

I recently needed to redirect a client's traffic from their old URL to a new one. In this case, they wanted any traffic going to plain example1.com to go to example2.com/blog and all other traffic to go to example2.com/[equivalent URI] (e.g., example1.com/about --> example2.com/about).

To do this, I messed around with rewrite rules and conditions for a while, until I decided on what seems to be a fairly straight forward solution:


# Redirect example1.com to example2.com/blog
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule ^$ http://example2.com/blog [r=301,L]

Have you ever wanted a user purchasing something from ubercart to fill out their user profile at the same time? uc_profile module allows you to do just that. This becomes especially handy if users are purchasing memberships on your site using uc_roles and you'd like to collect additional profile information from them at the same time.

Thanks to cooperation from indytechcook, the uc_profile module's original maintainer, Redfin Solutions now manages it and is looking forward to releasing improvements in the near future.

Networking in most social situations is difficult enough, but when you throw thousands of (often) socially awkward and introverted geeks together, the task becomes even more overwhelming. And these aren’t just any geeks, these are Drupal geeks, which means you’ve got a ton of smart, dedicated and interesting people to meet -- it’s just that some might need a little nudge. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend “Work the Pond!” by Darcy Rezac -- it, along with my own experiences, is what powers the following advice:

Introduce Yourself

If you're like us, we usually only want to have SOME files "private" and not ALL files as Drupal is limited to all-or-nothing out of the box. There are some modules out there that do this, but honestly it's pretty easy to do yourself.

Let's say you don't want anonymous users (or search engines) to download any files in your sites/default/files/private folder. Create a .htaccess file in the folder you wish to protect and add the following and save (this is for Apache, but similar for Windows systems):


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^GET$ [NC]

While debugging a client's site this weekend, I came across a rather dumbfounding issue. The site would look great in Firefox, but not in IE. In fact, IE seemingly ignored any CSS statements I would add to layout.css (part of a Zen-based custom theme).

If we look at the page source, Zen likes to add on a considerable number of CSS files along with several contributed modules -- over 40 CSS files total!

We manage our sites via SVN by first checking core and contributed Drupal modules from cvs.drupal.org. An explanation for this deserves its own post (coming soon...), but basically we check out from cvs.drupal.org and then import that into our SVN repository.

With modules such as CCK, you'll often notice that after updating it via CVS that you are left with a bunch of new objects (new translation, css, and other files) in folders and subfolders. Rather than svn add'ing each file and/or subfolder independently, try this in the root folder of the module you updated:

svn add * --force

That will add all the new files you acquired with your most recent CVS update.

It's best practice to hide your "files" folder from SVN since you probably don't want to inundate your repository with and endless number of updates. If you do this:


svn propset svn:ignore "*" sites/default/files
svn commit -m "Hide the files folder"


Then you should be all set, and you won't see any more "?" when you do a svn status command.

Okay, this one gets me all the time. I grant a role the ability to edit certain nodes and when they log in and try to edit a page, there's no edit tab!

Chances are that if you've tried everything else, you need to grant that role permission to use whichever input type you've set for that node or set of nodes. To do so:

1. Edit your node and check what input type it is set to use
2. Go to Site Configuration > Input Formats and then make sure that the corresponding input type is configured to allow the role to use that type.

We run several CiviCRM instances with our Drupal sites. One issue we ran into recently concerned contacts who unsubscribe from one group which was a subset of a larger group of contacts (of which they also belonged). When they would unsubscribe from one, they would still be subscribed to the other and thus were still receiving the newsletter. Aside from the fact that the group/newsletter setup was a bit un-ideal, we had to address the issue and manually unsubscribe the contacts from the other group. Here's how we did it:

MySQL and PostgreSQL's MD5() functions are nice, simple, ways to hash your data. Unfortunately, SQL Server 2005 and up (sorry, in order to get it working in SQL Server 2000, you'll need to try a stored proceedure), you can use the HASHBYTES() function.

In a recent SQL Server port of the Actions module for Drupal 5, I ran into the following MySQL query:


SELECT aid FROM {actions} WHERE MD5(aid) = '%s'