mcdruid.co.uk { web: development; }

This is a simple trick which (unless my googlefu simply failed me) I didn't find described anywhere when I had a quick look:

$ drush ev '$file = file_load(21749); var_dump(file_delete($file, TRUE));'
bool(true)

Cache invalidation is known as one of the very few hard things in computer science.

It seems to be a common misconception that Drupal's cache_get checks whether a given cache entry has expired, and won't return a stale result. In fact, in Drupal this is not always the case.

Quite some time ago I wrote a post about how patching makes you feel good in which I talked about the motivations for, and benefits of submitting patches on drupal.org (d.o). I concluded by suggesting that project maintainers should be generous in recognising the efforts of those who submit patches.

I was using the brilliant context module in a project recently. The fact that it uses ctools means it has a few characteristics reminiscent of views (and panels). One of these is the import / export functionality, and the distinction between the different types of storage for the contexts you've set up - i.e.

I recently found myself trying to use drush to set up a Drupal 6 install on a server where I did not have root access. I kept getting errors along the lines of this:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 1234 bytes)

I didn't have permission to edit the php.ini file for php_cli, so I had to find another workaround. The solution's pretty simple and comes courtesy of the drushrc.php file.

I was recently asked to add a simple twitter feed to a Drupal 5 site I built a few years ago. You know the sort of thing - a block in the sidebar with the 5 most recent tweets from the organisation's twitter account. Unfortunately, this turned out to be one of those requests that sounds like it's going to be really easy, but is not (especially on Drupal 5). I came up with a solution which does the job quite nicely, but it's a bit of a hack; I wouldn't do it like this on a new site - but then of course I wouldn't be using Drupal 5.