I have been having no end of problems with my outbound email messages sent by my Drupal sites since I switched from shared hosting to VPS hosting. A typical shared host offers a well configured SMTP server with documentation about how to configure the MX and SPF records. On the other hand, a VPS requires the administrator to install and configure the mail transfer agent, which can be surprisingly complex. Even more difficult is the fact that the VPS provider can’t really provide a one-size-fits-all set of instructions for configuring the MX and SPF records, since there are many more variables controlled by the VPS administrator. So, suffice to say that email configuration is probably the most dreaded task of most VPS administrators. In fact, many prefer to avoid the pain and suffering altogether and use a third party email provider. However, in my case, since one of my sites sends a lot of forum activity notification emails, I prefer to save on the cost of a third party email provider and do it myself. Read more

What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editors for Drupal are abundant. Good ones are not. Most WYSIWYG editors for Drupal produce messy markup and don’t respect the site’s CSS theme. Additionally, many of them don’t integrate well with Drupal and cause problems on certain browsers. Worse yet, almost none of them work on Apple and Android tablets and smartphones. There are a few decent WYSIWYG editors for Drupal that can produce decent markup if the writer uses the tool properly. But they are often abused by users who insist on typing up their post in Microsoft Word and then pasting it into the WYSIWYG editor, resulting in awfully messy code that renders terribly. What can be done to avoid these multiple issues? The answer: Don’t use WYSWIYG editors. Now, a Drupal site without WYSIWYG editing does not mean that all users need to become HTML gurus. To the contrary, there are several options for creating content in Drupal in an easy and clean way that doesn’t use messy WYSIWYG editors. Read more

It’s been a long time since I visited my site’s Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) settings page. I was happy to see that in 2012 Google apparently added a new option to sort results by date, as well as site image searching. This should be a real boon for users. But at the same time, I noticed that under the Look and Feel settings, it now says that the iFrame display method is deprecated. That’s fine by me, iFrames have been discouraged by web developers for years, so I’m glad to see that Google is moving away from them. So, I happily inserted the new Google CSE code into my Drupal 6 site and tried out the search function, only to be greeted by this error: Page not Found But fortunately, there is a workaround. And it’s not at all easy to find this information on the Internet. Background First of all, I should explain how I implemented the Google CSE on my Drupal 6 site. Read more