Skip to content

Category: WebDev

Sublime Packages

Hey, Sublime Text 3 has a new build version out! #3103 /kermit arms.

That makes this the perfect time to talk about my favorite customizations for it – Packages!

Sublime packages are a little like after market mods for your car. Or plugins. Either way they improve the usability and can do things like change the color of the interface or check your code for you.

First: Start off with the package installer, called Package Control.  https://packagecontrol.io/installation

Here are a few useful packages I have installed:

Themes

Do you have any packages that you’d recommend?

Why I <3++ Slack

Brief Intro to Slack

I’m a happy user of Slack, using it for the Madison Cartoonist Conspiracy art group, various classes and professionally.

I’m always astounded when people still haven’t heard of or used it, so I started keeping a list of links to share/email.  I think I’ll just refer to this post from now on, adding useful links as needed.

 

What is Slack?

https://slack.com/

How can teams use Slack?

https://slack.com/is/team-communication

WordPress.org uses Slack as their primary collaboration tool for their open source work.

Join WordPress Slack

There are many integrated services and apps that work with Slack.

https://slack.com/apps
Additionally, they have an excellently documented api
https://api.slack.com/slack-apps (for making an app that works with Slack)
https://mc-web.slack.com/apps/build/custom-integration (for making a custom connections)

Joey Day used the custom integration to hook slack up with Service Now ticket management system. (but you can link Jira or Zendesk too)

http://joeyday.com/2015/03/02/integrating-servicenow-with-slack/

Here is a case study of a small company who now uses Slack

http://slackhq.com/post/117188698390/picking-up-slack-at-panic

MF has some tips for using Slack/

http://ask.metafilter.com/267742/Tips-and-tricks-for-using-Slack

Some other tips

http://www.fastcompany.com/3046011/know-it-all/best-practices-from-the-most-active-slack-users

Other reading

Bad Node, Bad Node, whatcha gonna do?

I recently switched a site search from using external Google CSE search to using the internal Drupal Core search. This was fairly inconsequential.

I switched to Node search under Config -> Search and Metadata, swapped the CSE block out of my sidebar in Content ->Structure, made a few theme CSS changes to match and I should have been done.

Except for indexing the content, trivial, right? Just run cron a few times and you should be all set!

Only, no. That didn’t seem to work. I kept getting a couple strange errors in the log messages.

Warning: Creating default object from empty value in node_build_content() (line 1398 of /Users/user/sites/sitename/modules/node/node.module)

and

EntityMalformedException: Missing bundle property on entity of type node. in entity_extract_ids() (line 7879 of /Users/user/sites/sitename/includes/common.inc).

After a good deal of searching, and some helpful hints from the #drupal channel I tried a few different modules but none of them addressed the one issue I was having, which was increasing the indexing. I was stuck at 8%.

I finally found this post http://tappetyclick.com/blog/2013/01/14/how-find-bad-node-makes-search-indexing-cause-drupal-cron-fail

Which mentioned that they had found a solution on a Portuguese site, and translated it for us.

My drupal version is a little bit different than the example at tappetyclick, but the gist is: Output the indexing process to the log by adding a watchdog line to  the core file modules/node/node.module”

'watchdog ('cron', "indexing node {$node -> nid}"); // ADD THIS LINE'

This made my node_update_index() look like this:

function node_update_index() {
 $limit = (int)variable_get('search_cron_limit', 100);
 $result = db_query_range("SELECT n.nid FROM {node} n LEFT JOIN {search_dataset} d ON d.type = 'node' AND d.sid = n.nid WHERE d.sid IS NULL OR d.reindex <> 0 ORDER BY d.reindex ASC, n.nid ASC", 0, $limit, array(), array('target' => 'slave'));
foreach ($result as $node) {
 watchdog ('cron', "indexing node {$node -> nid}"); // ADD THIS LINE
 _node_index_node($node);
}
}

Then I ran cron manually and checked the log messages, filtering for cron types only.

cron 01/11/2016 - 5:00pm indexing node 1803 Anonymous 
cron 01/11/2016 - 5:00pm indexing node 702 Anonymous 
cron 01/11/2016 - 5:00pm indexing node 7676 Anonymous 
cron 01/11/2016 - 5:00pm indexing node 6801 Anonymous

Everytime I ran into EntityMalformedException: Missing bundle property on entity of type node in entity_extract_ids(), I’d look at the last node we’d tried to index, this was the bad node, and delete it from the database.

After removing about 40 of these bad nodes the core search index actually reached 100%. /kermitarms

Drupal tips

Drupal tip #1 – Locked out of site?

Empty the ‘sessions’ and ‘cache’ tables and login at

yoursite.com?q=user

 

Drupal tip #2 – random Ajax Error in the workbench?

Check your server memory settings, you may need to increase either the mysql memory or the limits in the php.ini

 

Find your current php.ini from Drupal Admin -> Reports – > Status Reports. 

Scroll down to the PHP line and click ‘more information‘ this will take you to a standard PHPINFO() page for your server.

Look for the Loaded Configuration File line to find where your current php.ini file is.

Consider increasing the Input_Vars limit.

Make sure to restart the server after making changes to the php.ini file.