Coldfront Labs

19/08/2009 - blog

Preventing PHP WSOD (White Screen of Death) in Drupal

As much as I love using Drupal, every once in a while something goes horribly, horribly wrong. Mind you, in most cases, I may have had a hand in the error (updated the wrong module, forgot a file or two, etc...) but the end result is the same; the dreaded WSOD (White Screen Of Death). These occur when PHP has some kind of error while processing your request. The problem with this is the user, unless they're technically inclined, has no idea why all they see is a big blank white screen (I'm assuming you've disabled the output of errors to the page in production. If you haven't, what are you waiting for!). Not only that, they'll just keep refreshing the page and potentially adding to your problems by having half executed PHP code running a muck on your data.

mwinstone's picture

Mathew Winstone

Director of Operations

mwinstone
13/07/2009 - story

Choosing the right CMS

I couldn't have said it better myself.
 
http://www.noupe.com/php/choosing-cms-tips.html
 
Great list of tips/questions to ask to choose the right CMS for you. In case you're wondering, Drupal passed this test for us ;-)

mwinstone
09/07/2009 - story

Drupal Quick Tip #7: Drupal behind a reverse proxy

I recently had to setup Drupal behind a reverse proxy server. (If you don't know what a reverse proxy server is, check it out on Wikipedia) One thing people may not realize about this sort of setup is if you want your logs for your visitors to show up properly, you need to change a setting inside your settings.php file. Here's how.
What you'll need: Drupal, a reverse proxy server
How to do it:

mwinstone
26/06/2009 - story

UNIX Quick Tip: Daisy chaining commands in the terminal

I discovered this this morning. I'm working on a tomcat application and I have to stop the server, deploy some theme changes with a script then start the server up again (I know, it's a dumb setup but I didn't write the app, I'm only using it ;-) So I'd type "stopcp" to stop the server, then the deploy skin script, then I'd type in "startcp". But (and this may have been obvious to everyone but me) if I put a semi-colon between the commands, I can have all three run one after the other automatically.

Example:

stopcp; deployskintemplate -t classic; startcp

Saves me from having to do three things. I can just sit back and watch it go. Hopefully you find this useful!

mwinstone
18/06/2009 - blog

Home-less iPhones: What to do when your iPhone / iPod's Home button stops working.

(Those not interested in my rambling exposition but just want the tips should skip on down to here)

Tomorrow can't possibly come quickly enough.

I don't mean that in some lofty, philosophical way. I mean quite literally that tomorrow, June 19th can't possibly come quickly enough. I've been counting down many, many days until the newest iteration of the iPhone is released. I can already hear the eyes rolling, because it seems half of the Internet has been also looking forward to it (and the other half seems hell-bent on telling us why we're stupid, but that's another post altogether). Bear with me, though, and I'll explain why.

cmillward's picture

Christopher Millward

Web Developer

cmillward
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