drupal

This post may be a little bit premature - there may be more multisite issues lurking - but given that the Drupal documentation seems to go out of its way NOT to be helpful, here's a quick tip for installing multiple Drupal-powered domains:

- don't use the 'default' site - it'll just confuse you. leave sites/default empty so that if a site falls through, it gives an error
- keep a copy of the original settings.php from your Drupal install lying around
- when you want to create a new site, put a fresh copy of the original settings.php into sites/default

So, I'm trying to migrate a phpBB-based forum to Drupal, so that I have a "integrated" software that provides more than just forums (blogs, pages, etc). When I hit a road block: Drupal out-of-the-box has no equivalent of phpBB's "private" forums!

Luckily, if all you want is phpBB-like private forums, there is a fairly easy solution:
1) Install the "tac_lite" (Taxonomy Access Control Lite) module, from http://drupal.org/project/tac_lite.
2) Activate the module

At http://drupal.org/node/127104 is a code snippet so that user pictures in Drupal only show up in the forums, not on other pages (ex: front page, books) where they might look out-of-place.

Briefly (in case the link dies), the trick is to edit your node.tpl.php to not display pictures at all (comment out/remove the print $picture part) yet keep it in your node-forum.tpl.php. This is assuming you have a node-forum.tpl.php, of course.

There is a bit of frustration with trying to get Drupal working on a GoDaddy Linux shared hosting plan, specifically the "Clean URLs" feature. I don't pretend to understand it, but in case anyone else is struggling with this, here's how it went for me:

1. For starters, I was porting an existing Drupal from another site over to GoDaddy. The previous installation had "Clean URLs" working fine.
2. I moved the code over to GoDaddy, updated the database settings, and was happy to see the home page come up.
3. Sadly, that is ALL that would come up. Any other link gives a 404 Error page.

I just wasted the better part of an hour trying to troubleshoot a "cron run failed" error on one of my Drupal sites (oddly, only one of four was affected). Trying to run cron manually from the status page gives a "cron run failed" error, and looking at the "Recent log entries" (aka watchdog, apparently) showed a message "Attempting to re-run cron while it is already running".