You may have noticed if you have looked at the page source of Drupal sites that they often have two content type metatags

This is a remnant of a security fix to ensure that the page always had a content type. (you can read all about it here http://drupal.org/node/451304

If you use the Ubercart module suite for Drupal to create e-commerce sites (we do and love it!) then one of the things you may wish to do is to change the default 'cart' to 'basket' - for a non-US audience. There is no setting in the Ubercart modules to enable this - but it is really easy and here's how to do it.
Get the excellant string overrides module and install it. Then set it up to swap the following fields:

Drupal is great and the taxonomy system is great - but large taxonomies (over 1,000 terms are a headache for any system) and Drupal is no different. I have a new taxonomy for a project with > 5k terms in a three deep hierarchy and using it presents some usability, performance and other issues.
So I though I would take a break and write a bit about evaluating some Drupal contributed modules for working with large taxonomies:

A general housekeeping task for CMS systems such as Wordpress and Drupal and other websites and good practice to keep your site SEO high is to make sure you are gracefully handling missing pages (404 errors).
One of the routine tasks to carryout is checking for crawl errors in Google Webmaster tools. If you see any missing pages in the list it is worth making sure you have some measures in place to handle these and ideally issue a 301 redirect so that Google and other search engines update their indexes.

Drupal is a very secure software framework ideally suited to providing content management and social integration platforms. It has been vetted and road-tested by some of the most security-conscious web sites on the planet: Drupal powers high profile governmental websites from the U.S. White House (whitehouse.gov) to the official website for the Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority (London.gov.uk). But they are not isolated examples as Drupal provides the framework for over 500,000 other sites across the web (e.g.

Web content management system (WCMS) frameworks such as Drupal enable us to build custom website solutions based on a solid framework. This means that we can develop rich website solutions rapidly without our clients having to pay for us to reinvent the wheel.  WCMS solutions also provide the client with full editorial control over the implemented website freeing them from being tied to a proprietary solution.

To ensure that we are able to provide the quality of website services our clients have come to expect we provide the full services of an Internet Service Provider (ISP). This enables us to provide custom, secure and high performance website solutions.  We provide services to manage the complete web presence for your website from registration and hosting through security and performance monitoring and support.

Update: we have now combined this site with our main site! And all the articles are available in the one site.

We wanted to create a home for our knowledgebase and created the website technology.blue-bag.com. Here we provide a range of articles and posts covering issues from using CMS systems such as Drupal through to security articles covering securing access to your website.

Whether you are running Drupal,Wordpress, Expression engine, Joomla or in fact any web site one of the regular tasks you should carryout on your web site is a bit of log analysis. It is often left up to modules, plug ins or someone else to protect your web site until it too late.
We all rely on Google Analytics to tell us about visitors and maybe use our log analysis software (AWStats, Webaliser etc) to report on log entries - but it is always worth using tools locally to dig deeper into your logs. These can range from simple reports on accesses to your site to more detailed forensic analysis of site activity.
By doing this we get to know better how visitors are accessing our site and can uncover some interesting answers to questions such as:

• How often is Google actually spidering my site?
• How many errors am I getting and what are they?
• Who is stealing my content?
• Is anyone trying to crack my site?

In this post I will briefly cover some useful techniques to analyse you logs and see if any one is abusing your hospitality.

It ducked!
Monday morning the sun is shining and your email box is full of emails saying cron is failing on one of your sites.
In this post I will look at what is going on, how you can troubleshoot it and fix it and how life may be made easier in the future by a) adding a bit of logging to cron and b) features in Drupal 7.

So you have created your Drupal site,configured to be as search engine friendly as you can, added loads of good content and all is well - traffic is building up and you are getting great feedback from regular visitors. Then some updates to your modules are available and you need to put the site into maintenance mode whilst you upgrade these - and that is when you find that the maintenance Site Offline page is in the classic minelli theme and that isn't what you want at all. In this post I will show you how to theme your maintenance pages in under 5 minutes with 3 simple steps.

One of the features of Wordpress 2.9 was the addition of support for Thumbnails in posts. One of the frequent question we get is How do I show thumbnails in posts?

If your theme supports thumbnails then on the post edit page you will see a Post Thumbnail box at the bottom of the right column.

If your theme doesn't 'natively' support thumbnails - you can fix it with a few lines of code.

The first thing to do is to locate the functions.php file in your theme directory and add the following snippet:

Some modules use the same hook and therefore are 'called' in succession. Sometimes you would like (need) a particular module to fire after or before other modules. An example is the XML site map module that would best fire after the pathauto module to ensure that the site map contains the final version of the urls used for pages in your site. There are a number of ways to manage this -

When you first install Drupal it creates the master user (1) - this should ideally not be used to create content and it is good practice to create a new user for administrative purposes (not called admin but with an equivalent set of permissions) and an administrators group so that the super user doesn't get used - it may even be worth blocking the super user once you have done that. But be aware that some modules need to impersonate that user. If you want to restrict login for that user you can create an Access Rule to deny Admin for user name - this will effectively disallow logging in as Admin.

One of the first steps to setting up a new Drupal site is to setup the regular Cron job. Hosting services vary in their support for cron and the usual methods (such as wget, curl etc). This post explores options to configure cron on a hosted server.

When you develop CMS sites it is best practice to have local development copies as opposed to working directly on the live production server. If you have multiple such sites on a WAMP install you will need to mange cron to keep these up to date. In this post we look at a number of options available to you.

It is easy to forget that the files in your web site are visible to anyone even if they are not linked to or are not files normally requested. In this post we look at how to use the.htaccess file to control access to your site.

Although we do build solutions for our clients from the ground up, we increasingly base our IT solutions on standard content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress (for simple sites and blogs) and Drupal (for more complex and tailored solutions)

We provide solutions for our customers based on standard open source content management systems such as WordPress and Drupal.  These powerful solutions enable us to rapidly develop rich and attractive websites that our clients can manage.

Over ten years ago when we started creating web sites and applications to manage biodiversity related information we needed a public website to act as a host for these projects. UKWildlife.com was created to provide web space for not for profit Biodiversity and conservation projects and provide resources for biodiversity projects.

One of the trends these days is to lose the www. from your domain name.
Arguments for are usability (e.g. you don't have as much typing to do - it is easier to not have to say dubyadubyadubya every time you give out your web address).
There are counter arguments of course to do with cookie control and sites that have sub-domains etc.
What is important though is that you choose one and stick to it. In any event you should decide for one and not allow both.
Supporting both will cause duplicate content in Google and you may suffer in SEO terms.