Monthly Archives: December 2008

Drupal with Dreamweaver

I had to migrate and setup the whole workspace at my old desktop machine last week after the breakdown of my HP notebook. So while setting it up I thought this little piece of trick could help someone who is fond of Dreamweaver and looking for an IDE to code Drupal.

As a side note, one could accuse me of promoting unethical software and in fact I don’t refute it (even though it is not my intention). I also know there are many great open source editors for coding PHP like Eclipse-PDT and even Gedit which could be transformed to a very helpful IDE. But on other hand I’m kind of addicted to DW after long years of working with it and if someone who already has DW looking for a way to use it for coding Drupal this could be helpful.

The most frustrating thing when coding Drupal modules or themes with DW is that it doesn’t recognize it as a PHP script and doesn’t give any validation or auto completion features like it usually does for php scripts. To fix this there’s little configuration to be done.

First find the installed directory of DW (if it’s Windows it most probably in ~/Program Files or if it’s Linux+wine it should be in your virtual windows environment) and go to Configuration->DocumentTypes. There should be a xml file called MMDocumentTypes that holds configurations regarding which language should be used for a given file format.

Find the line that says,
‘<documenttype id=”PHP_MySQL” servermodel=”PHP MySQL”….’
and depending on weather you are using windows or mac, append ‘,module,install,theme,inc’ to existing winfileextension or macfileextension values.

So for windows it should look like this.

<documenttype id=”PHP_MySQL” servermodel=”PHP MySQL” internaltype=”Dynamic” winfileextension=”php,php3,php4,php5,module,install,theme,inc” />

Now restart DW and open your module or theme file. Ta da!..it should now work as a normal php script.

Hope this will be helpful to someone looking for a way to convert Dreamweaver to a more Drupal friendly place.

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PHP + Large files

I was working on the project Hotelotravel for last few months and as usual in many cases it involved working with large database files because when you consider all hotels, locations and images all over the world it means a lot. But if we want to do large file uploads or database updates with PHP there are few configurations to be done to default settings and I’m putting this as a note to myself (I’m always keep forgetting this) as well as to any one who may find this useful like when importing a large backup file through phpMyAdmin.

In your php.ini check for these settings and change them as you need.

  • post_max_size (The maximum size of post data you can send in one submission)
  • upload_max_filesize (Maximum size of file that can be uploaded)
  • memory_limit (Maximum memory limit that can be allocated for a script execution)
  • max_execution_time (Maximum time limit for a script execution)

As a side note, if you trying to import large files (backups.etc) through phpMyAdmin and it refuses, you may need to edit config.inc.php file and change these settings to 0 which means no limit.

  • $cfg[‘ExecTimeLimit’]
  • $cfg[‘MemoryLimit’]

As a final note, these settings are there for a purpose. So my advice is change them in whatever manner  you want in a development environment but be very careful when setting them in a production environment because an endless execution of a script can cause your servers to waste bandwidth and even crash.  So I guess this is my disclaimer 😉

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