Open source will take over IT

A report on ZDNet has suggested that Open source will take over from mainstream IT within the next 12 years. It also predicted that 40% of IT jobs will come from the open source sector.

Drupal wins Packt Publishing 2008 Open Source CMS Award

Drupal has won Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Award for 2008. This is the second year in a row that Drupal has won the overall CMS award and is in addition to the Best PHP Based Open Source CMS Award for 2008.

Drupal wins the 2008 Best PHP Based Open Source CMS

Drupal has one the 2008 Best PHP Based Open Source CMS from Packt Publishing. It beat fellow finalists Joomla and CMS Made Simple, who ere tied for runner up. It seems that Drupal's highly module framework and thriving community are two factors that tipped the award in its favour.

WAMP and Skype Conflict

I have just discovered a conflict between Skype and WampServer that I thought I would share. They both use port 80 which causes the conflict. If you run Skype before running Wamp, then Apache will not run. If you go to a site on localhost, you will probably get a blank screen.

MySQL Server Has Gone Away Error - Cause & Solution

The MySQL Server has gone away error can happen when trying to restore a database. There are a few possible causes for this and one of the most likely is that the database is very big in size and the packet size in MySQL is not big enough.

Restore MySQL database in WampServer

If you are running WampServer on your local machine, it can be a bit tricky to restore a MySQL database. You need to do it from the Windows command line (DOS prompt), rather then the MySQL console command line. The actual MySQL restore command is slightly different to normal and you need to make sure you are in the right directory first.

Redirect users to the login form if access is denied

Out of the box Drupal will display a simple Access Denied message is a user is trying to access content that they do not have permission to. This is not exactly user friendly. A better solution is to redirect the user to the login form and when the user logs in, redirect them back to the content that they want to see. There are two main ways to achieve this.

Copy an entire directory in FreeBSD

Copying an entire directory in FreeBSD (a Unix based operating system similar to Linux) is very easy.

The following example is to copy a directory on a web server. Firstly, you must create the destination directory.

Rebuild node permissions table on large sites with many nodes

Every now and again the node permissions table on a Drupal site can go out of whack. The result is that some users may get an accessed denied message when trying to access pages.

This is fairly easy to fix on a "normal size" website. You simply go to admin -> content -> post settings and click "Rebuild permissions".

Reset auto increment after deleting a table row

It is often the case that a column such as the ID column on a table will auto increment. This simply means that the next insert into the table will have an ID that is one more then the previous one and therefore all ID's will be unique.