Drupal CheckDrupal quick tips and tricks before going live!

• Go to Site configuration > Error reporting
• Set Error reporting list box to Write errors to log
• Save configuration

Consider installing the Boost module to create static HTML versions of pages that are served anonymously. Cached pages don't even use PHP (they are served as .html files) let alone create or use queries in MySQL so caching is super fast. Cached pages can be cleared on a regular basis with cron. Works with multisites and provides speed improvements to almost any Drupal site. Requires modification of default .htaccess file.

Having an .htaccess file is a pain regarding performances. Apache needs to read it on every single request (the page, every image, CSS files, JS files, etc.).

It is strongly recommended to move rules defined in Drupal .htaccess file in your Apache global configuration or in your vhost configuration file. This way all rules are only loaded 1 time, during Apache start.

To achieve this, just copy/paste your .htaccess content in your Apache server configuration file and don't forget to surround it by the directory where your Drupal install resides.

Note that we added AllowOverride None to prevent Drupal .htaccess to be read by Apache.

Check for syntaxe error:

$ apachectl configtest

And restart Apache:

$ apachectl restart

Note that if you are on Plesk, you must use the following command before restarting Apache:

$ /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -u --vhost-name=example.com

If you what Pathauto to transform caracters with accents into simple letters like:

• éèêë to become e
• àâï to become a

You must enable in Pathauto the option Transliterate prior to creating alias. But by default, you can't tick the checkbox.

You first need to rename a file. From within the Pathauto directory, rename i18n-ascii.example.txt to i18n-ascii.txt. Once renamed, you can enable the option from the Pathauto settings form.

Create a node (a page content type for example) with some extra information so that your visitors don't ever fall on the default 403 page not found.

Once this node is created:

• Remember its node ID,
• Go to Administer > Site configuration > Error reporting
• Set Default 403 (not found) page to the node ID you just created
• Save your settings

You can alternatively use the Search 404 module.

Cron is a deamon which triggers certain actions (cron jobs) at configured times. Windows has an equivalent system called Task Scheduler. Calling cron.php at regular intervals will allow, amongst others, the indexation of content the content and to check for updates.

Setting up a cron job under a *nix system is fairly easy.

1. Create or edit a crontab by typing in a terminal crontab -e
2. Assuming that you have one of the following programs on your system, add one of the following line to trigger a request to cron.php every hour:
   • 0 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -O - -q -t 1 http://example.com/cron.php
   • 0 * * * *  /usr/bin/lynx -source http://example.com/cron.php
   • 0 * * * * curl --silent --compressed http://example.com/cron.php
3. Save and exit your editor.

Setting up cron jobs on Windows is almost as easy! See Resources below.

Drupal logs information about cron jobs. Once you have configured it, you should see entries in your logs (Administer > Reports > Status report and Administer > Reports > Recent log entries) indicating the status of the related tasks.

There are some conventions when using contributed modules and/or themes. Most users would want to place them in modules and themes folders.

Don't ever do that! Never place modules or themes in these directories!

Everything added to a fresh Drupal install should go somewhere in the sites directory:

• Contributed modules (from drupal.org) should go in sites/all/modules/contrib
• Project custom modules should go in sites/all/modules/custom
• Contributed themes (from drupal.org) should go in sites/all/themes/contrib
• Project custom themes should go in sites/all/themes/custom

Note that if you have a multisite environment, you could place somes of the modules/themes:

• in sites/default/..
• or sites/example.com/..
• or sites/anotherdomain.com/..
• and so on..

... depending on your configuration.

Note that using a contrib and custom directory convention will help you find out which modules are contributed by the drupal community and which you have developped specifically for the website.

This will allow you to update more easily your websites as the only directory you will need to preserve will be sites/*.

There are a number of settings for contact forms that are easy to miss, since they aren't readily visible on the site. After you are sure that all the settings are right, you should also submit a test contact on every unique contact form to make sure the email address actually works.

The Site Information settings page at /admin/settings/site-information contains the from address setting.

/admin/build/contact has "To:" addresses and auto-responders, etc.

If you use Webforms, there are similar settings at /admin/settings/webform and per-node at /admin/content/webform (minimally, check the to address in each webform node).

Check API keys (e.g. Google Maps API key) particular keys which assigned to a domain.