As I related in the previous post, I had been amiss at keeping my sites clean of spam. One of the clever spammers decided to abuse the blog option on one of my sites. Hundreds of entries had been made, so I decided to delete the user account. Drupal has an option to delete everything that user created when you delete the account. I chose that. My mistake. 

My site ended up showing a perpetual list of entries that just had n/a in them. No links, no way of deleting them. Sure, I tried to delete the node ID from the content option, but they wouldn't show up. When I tried to jump to the node ID directly I was told I didn't have rights to view the page. Fun.

I've been amiss about updating all my sites. Since I use Drupal as the CMS for 90% of my sites, I was surprised to see a couple of them had major issues. One of the more devastating errors was the Can't open file: 'node_revisions.MYI' error.

I am pretty sure this occurs due to a module not working properly, but I am not sure yet. This error was caused by spammers coming onto the site and getting around the SPAM module.  

Anyway, this one has a very simple fix, which I found on the main Drupal site. 

You need to go into PHPMYADMIN through your cPanel interface. You can get to it by clicking on the MySQL icon and then selecting the  phpMyAdmin option. In the first screenshot you'll see how to select the MySQL icon and in the second you'll see how to open phpMyAdmin:

Yes, I know the standard Drupal modules are very useful, but there are 5 add on modules that can really add to your site. 

Here are the top 5 most useful Drupal modules:

1) Google Analytics: Google offers a great statistics package for your website called Google Analytics. This module allows you to automatically add support for it to your Drupal site. 

2)  Graphstat: Like Google Analytics? Want more Drupal specific information? Look no further than the Graphstat module. It breaks out Drupal specific information for you in an easy to read page. 

I use Drupal extensively on several projects since I like it's flexibility and ease of use. The problem with Drupal is that its support sucks. It's a crap shoot whether you can find what you need on the Drupal forums. There are a couple of reasons for this.

The first is that the basic Drupal search sucks. I mean really sucks. You would think that a database based program would have a better search, but Drupal lacks one. You can add a module such as Trip Search to your site and you have power, but the main Drupal site doesn't use this.

I've long been a fan of the Drupal software. From an end user's perspective it's clean and easy to use as content management systems go. Recently, a project cropped up that needed a content management system and I decided to go with Drupal. It's been an interesting learning curve.

Drupal is open source and the user community is large, so help is only a forum post away. Yet there are several areas that seem to be harder than necessary.

For instance, I wanted to add inline adsense to my articles. The forums at the Drupal site weren't very helpful for someone who is new to the scene. I guess if you're a PHP and CSS whiz all you have to do is just do it. But, alas, I am not. Sure, I know enough to hack around, but get me ten lines out and I am lost.