All posts by Paula Carlson

Disappearing content? WUWT?

Today one of the WordPress MU blogs I administer (no, we have not updated them yet, don’t ask) played a little trick on me and ate some of its posts. Not all of them, mind you, just some of them, and all from the same category. I won’t lie, there was definitely some panic running through my email inbox. I contacted ITS in blind terror that it wouldn’t be recoverable, especially since a reporter was going to be accessing that site at any moment to do a story on it, and there was nothing I could do to stop her. And because this is the way with emergencies, everyone was at lunch.

There was nothing more I could do from my end, so I sat back and waited, chewing my nails and unable to concentrate on anything else. About an hour later, ITS guy came moseying along to my desk, and said, “I don’t understand the problem, I can see everything just fine.”

?!

Continue reading Disappearing content? WUWT?

Kicking Drupal ass today

It’s Drupal day again, and import data problem continues to piss me off (migrate refuses to pass properly export my tables to View, and eventually just stopped importing my table rows at all; and node-import keeps failing at step 7, line 668). So instead of beating that dead horse some more, I moved on to problems I could actually solve, and solve them I did!

First, the breadcrumbs. I needed to a) include breadcrumbs, and b) style them to match the design. I used the Menu Breadcrumb module to solve the first problem, so that the breadcrumb would draw from Primary Links instead of Navigation. For the second, I first turned to Pro Drupal Development by John K. VanDyk–page 181 had the advice I needed, i.e. to add the following function to my theme’s template.php to change the breadcrumb separator from ‘>’ to ‘: :’ :

function phptemplate_breadcrumb($breadcrumb) {
if (!empty($breadcrumb)) {
return ''. implode(' : : ', $breadcrumb) .'';
}
}

But that wasn’t enough. I needed to remove “Home” as the first item of the breadcrumb, so I changed the above code to this:

function phptemplate_breadcrumb($breadcrumb) {
if (!empty($breadcrumb)) {
unset($breadcrumb[0]);
return ''. implode(' : : ', $breadcrumb) .'';
}
}

And that fixed that problem! The rest was just updating the css in the breadcrumb call in my page.tpl.php file:

For some reason, my css wasn’t working on the “: :”, so I fonted them, but otherwise this worked perfectly! Breadcrumb success!

Except, then the client wanted the breadcrumb changed for one content type. No problem!

(shoot, can’t put the code here without serious edits, due to its extreme php-ness. Damn! But there’s good info on hiding blocks for specific node types here.)

Seriously, I was on fire today!

Next problem, the drop down menus were appearing under the flash slideshows on six pages. I thought it had something to do with Nice Menus, but after much googling, I found the fix to this was actually in the Flash embed code, so I added this code to the swfobject code for each:

so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");

And those are the things I fixed today. Woot!