By default Drupal sends out all its emails in plain text, but there are some good modules available that make it easy to send out HTML mails. The two most popular ones are HTML Mail and Mime Mail. Both can achieve similar results, but this tutorial will explain how to do it with HTML Mail.

I'm working on a website that required an easy way to associate locations with a content type. It should be possible to first select a Province from a dropdown list, and then choose from a list of the towns in that province.

The use case: a multilingual Drupal 7 site, with each language having a different node to serve as front page. Each of the nodes have the same URL alias "home". Setting the homepage to the "home" URL does not work, since the Path module is returning the first match it finds, causing the wrong translation to be shown for all but one language.

The solution is in the i18n_variables module which is a part of the Internationalization module. This module allows to customize the front page variable for every language separately.

Hamster is a very handy time tracking tool for Gnome. It is an applet which lives in the Gnome panel which is great as it is always readily available. You can switch tasks and projects effortlessly, add tags to tasks, see pretty graphs and print out time sheets for your boss or clients.

By default, Gnome does not provide a print option in the right-click menu of the file browser. Luckily it is very easy to add more functions to this menu.

Web site owners prefer to have a CMS that is tailored to their personal computer expertise level. TinyMCE is great for the less computer literate user, as its button driven interface resembles the common word processors they are familiar with and all confusing HTML markup is hidden.

TinyMCE can be customized, allowing you to pick only the functions that are needed. Still some things can be simplified even further for computer novices. I'll show how you can hide potentially confusing options such as link targets and titles using CSS.

In this article I will set up an extremely easy to use editor with support for paragraphs, links and bulleted lists, alongside with cut/copy/paste and undo/redo buttons for convenience.

I run Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 on my Acer Aspire One netbook. A couple of days ago my SSD drive died and until the replacement drive arrives I would like to continue using the netbook, running the operating system directly from a USB stick.

I was very excited to learn that the developers of the VLC player are working on a cross platform non-linear video editor. I spent some time getting it to compile and made a script that will install it automatically.

Updating MySQL is a piece of cake with the custombuild tool. You just need to make sure the option 'mysql_inst' is set to 'yes' in the options.conf file; if not the MySQL update will be skipped.

Update: I no longer recommend SVN for deployment. Use git instead!

Subversion is a great tool when you are working on a website with multiple developers. To make life really easy it is possible to set up svn so the website is automatically updated after doing a commit. This is done using the post-commit hook.

I have an SVN repository set up in the folder /svn/repo on the web server. The developers have their own logins to this repository, but the difficulty is that the website is in its own home folder. We have to make sure the files in the web root are updated with the right owner and permissions. We can do this by creating a small binary which can be executed as the correct user after doing a commit.

These instructions are for CentOS, but can be used on other linuxes with some minor path changes.