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Bulk deleting drupal nodes

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Posted Sep 26, 2011
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Sometimes, for one reason or another, you may need to bulk delete hundreds or perhaps thousands of nodes at once... For me this was to rid a demo site of thousands of spam posts that had built up over the years. Here is a fairly painless way to do it using a method that respects Drupal (version 6).

Place the following into a new node textarea field (page, book, etc) with php filtering or perhaps a custom menu callback in a mini-module:

*WARNING*

Running this code in your site may result in deleted data!

Tricks on cleaning up Drupal polls

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Posted Mar 25, 2010
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Conservation of space can be of paramount importance to preserving the integrity of a design while implementing a Drupal site! However some components of a Drupal site are truly space hogs! Polls are an excellent example.

One of my personal "beefs" with polls is that the space of the poll is used wastefully as well as inconsistently. This is particularly true of the results layout. As you may remember, if you have used Drupal polls, each choice in the voting form uses one line of space (typically), whereas the results layout that you see after voting use three lines for each choice. Yuk!

So, I decided to remedy this and condense the results into one liners as well. To do this I needed to move the choice text down into the poll bar as well as move the statistical info up beside the poll bar.

Vertical align on forms

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Posted Jan 11, 2010
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Recently I ran into an issue where I was altering the default search form to use an image_button (see image_button). A call to hook_form_FORM_ID_alter(&$form, $form_state) is what I used to replace the default submit button with an image button.

Once I got the image to show up I realized that the darn thing was way out of alignment. The submit image was at least 7px above the input field. My first thought was I was going to have to do some relative positioning. Thankfully I did a search and I found a forum post here that identified a better way to do it.

Views for group navigation

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Posted Dec 15, 2009
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Creating cool navigation utilities is a snap with Views. This post will focus on my efforts to put together a view that outputs a list of groups that are in the same category as the group we are currently looking at.

I believe this would be possible with contexts in panels however I am looking to build just a single block that I can do with as I please.

Step 1: To get started I navigate to the views administration screen at /admin/build/views and create a new view named group_navigation.

Using cumulus with Drupal

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Posted Sep 21, 2009
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The cumulus project provides some very nice eye candy for your tag clouds. The cumulus project is what we are currently using on CollectiveColors.

The README.txt of the cumulus project does not, however, do a very good job of explaining what is required to install it and get it running.

12 steps to getting cumulus running in Drupal

IE7 3px gap float bug

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Posted May 28, 2009
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So it would seem that there is a new 3px gap bug for IE7. I think it may be related to the original 3px bug that was prevalent in IE6. However according to Position is Everything (A very well respected source of great IE trickery and design principles), this bug died with IE6 (If only IE6 would actually die).

So, while working on getting a few <div>s to ride up the side of a floating <div>, I found that IE7 does still have some sort of problem that causes a 3px gap to develop beside the "floater."

jQuery nested animations and each

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Posted May 28, 2009
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This piece is somewhat technical so if the word jQuery has no meaning to you, you might want to calmly back away from your computer or your head may explode. You've been warned!

So I ran into an interesting problem while designing one of the animations used on the FAQ page. Stated as simply as possible: I found that one must be careful about triggering animations within animations particularly when the outer animation(s) applied to an array of jQuery objects while the inner animation applied to a jQuery object completely external to the objects that are being manipulated with the outer animation. Seems straightforward enough right?