SMTP relay via Mandrill Service

Submitted by Jitesh Doshi on

If you have ever tried to send emails from your dedicated server in the cloud to either a mailing list or to individual users of your site, you would know that it is not as simple as it sounds. Depending upon the reputation of the IP address asigned to your server, many large email providers might block your emails - even though you have a perfectly legitimate reason to send this email, and your company has never spammed anyone. The solution we implemented was subscribing to the excellent Mandrill transactional email server from https://mandrillapp.com/ and sending all our emails via them. The problem then is how to makes sure all your emails as routed (relayed) through them? For your Drupal emails, you can use the Mandrill module, but that covers only Drupal (and has other issues). So what we really did was route emails to Mandrill at SMTP MTA (Mail Transport Agent) configuration level itself. The rest of the article describes how.

Integrating Apache Solr with Drupal Autocomplete

Submitted by Sergey Cheban on

Although Drupal has a good built-in search functionality that coumes out of the box, sometimes a client wants something more advanced and feature rich that scales well for a quickly growing website.  This is where Apache Solr comes into play.  Apache Solr is an open source project that is used on many high traffic websites like Zappos.com and is well integrated into Drupal.

RESTfully creating a repository in BitBucket.org

Submitted by Jitesh Doshi on

Creating a  Git repository is simple, using the excellent BitBucket.org service. It can be a chore to go to the bitbucket website and manually creating new repositories every time, though. Since it is bitbucket, and Atlassian, they have exposed a very nice RESTful API on top their service offering. Below is an example of how to create a new repository from 'curl' command-line ...

Drupal jQuery behaviors

Submitted by Jitesh Doshi on

In this article, I try to explain "Drupal Behaviors". Drupal provides a very clean way of attaching JavaScript code to HTML components. It includes jQuery library with it. So you have to do nothing to add jQuery to your app. But on top of it, you also don't have to attach onload event handlers in JavaScript. Instead you simply write "Drupal JS behaviors" which are JavaScript functions that get invoked when attached (document loaded) or detached (document unloaded).

Let's take a look at an example:

tikkits.com bags ticketing and seat selection for 3 Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy shows

Submitted by Jitesh Doshi on

Tikkits.com will be the exclusive online point-n-click seat selection and ticketing service for Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy shows in Los Angeles (June 2, 2013), Atlanta (June 23) and Tampa (June 29). Tikkits.com thanks the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPI) and Paracha Entertainment for their continued trust in the Tikkits.com team.

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Automating Drupal user login and maintaining session in curl

Submitted by Jitesh Doshi on

Using the services module in Drupal to expose CRUD operations on nodes is a great way to expose RESTful service from Drupal. All you have to do is to enable rest_server sub-module and create a REST server in it. Now you start fetching your nodes in XML, JSON or many other formats. Now for testing, the 'curl' command line browser was used to make HTTP requests in an automated fashion. Making read-only requests to fetch nodes as JSON was easy.

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