Labor Saving Modules & Tips

Ooh, good topic! As a themer I rely heavily on:

Theme Developer module (for 6)
It tells you important stuff you need to know about what template or function is being called -- and makes suggestions for what file you'd use to theme a function -- just by hovering over the area with your cursor. It's so nice it almost feels like cheating. The video is helpful.
http://drupal.org/themedeveloper

And then for tracking down what styles are being called:

Firefox's Firebug extension
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
Same deal -- you can hover over areas and it will tell you what styles are being applied to it and shows a collapsible view of the DOM so you can track down problems. I also use the Web Developer Toolbar for editing CSS. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

Looking forward to other suggestions...

Backups, backups, backups!

Use coder module for helping you upgrade modules. You should also take a look at deadwood module, but it modifies the files directly so i'd back them up first!

Devel module, the handy "clear cache" and "rebuild menus" links in the devel block are very useful!

Cheers,
Stella

Stella, your comment reminded me -- I've got a drupal (mysql) database that's headed toward 100MB, and I'd love some suggestions for how to make sure I'm getting good backups out of such a large file.

PHPMyAdmin chokes on that size a file, so I tend to break it up into smaller chunks of tables and back it up that way. I also have a SQL tool that theoretically captures and gzips the whole table, but won't import it -- it times out --- so that's theoretical at best.

Has anyone else run into this? Is there a good way to make sure for example, that you are grabbing all the node or user information selectively? I think I've done it before, but lack of sleep is making me stupid -- and I don't seem to be searching the groups, handbook or other help content effectively.

There's probably a way to do this through PhpMyAdmin... but using Backup and Migrate- you can select not to backup the cache tables and other parts you don't need... this is helpful and can greatly reduct the size of your back up.

http://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate

phpmyadmin has file size restriction - so I've given up using it for large sites. Instead I've found Navicat to be the best thing since slice bread - it runs on both Windows and Mac OS X for Mysql and Postgres.

I end up using the command line for big files, but the syntax is pretty simple. It does take shell access on a hosted server, or you can do it from the DOS prompt in windows if you navigate to the folder where mysql is installed and go into the 'bin' subdirectory.

Then to dump (create a backup) use:

To restore the backup, switch the > or < sign:

Thank you for the backup tips; I needed to be reminded about Navicat - it's great! What a labor saver.

I didn't know about Theme Developer until now -- what a great idea! There are so many great modules out there even with the help of ratings pages it's hard to know what's REALLY useful -- and KNOW the coders out there have their own pet third party tools that they love for code checking.

So -- what do you use, like, love, want to know more about? What's in you're ideal automatic kitchen?

One module that I got addicted to w/ Drupal 5 but may have been replaced in functionality by views is Taxonomy DHTML -- it's a simple one, just makes automatically updating menus from your taxonomy -- but SO Useful. Set the taxonomy right, and you have an instant menu system.

I use this.
mysqldump --opt -u MYUSERNAME -p MYDBNAME > backup.sql

One benefit of not using the -p MYPASSWORD is that the .history file won't have a record of the password, where anyone who can find the ,history file can see it. If you just put -p, it'll prompt you for the password.

(I also love the backup and migrate module.)

My life saver is the dbscripts module (http://drupal.org/project/dbscripts), in which I am completely bias because I made it. It allows me to dump, erase, restore and merge database files, optimizing the capability to version control the database and team development.

The next tip I need is how to find time to maintain a module, and do a D6 upgrade. heh. I also for some reason have some sort of disconnect between what I am damn sure I committed, and what is ending up for people to download!

I'm just new to Drupal, so haven't been using these for long, but anticipate using them from now on. I am using Drupal 6.

http://drupal.org/project/admin_menu
Puts a menu in the top 20px of the page with all the admin menu items and flyouts of the subitems.

http://drupal.org/project/adminrole
When you add a new module it gives the admin role all the permissions for it

http://drupal.org/project/moduleinfo
Each enabled module has extra info with links to all the pages the module uses (saves searching around in the different admin menus to find what the module changed and where its settings files are).

http://drupal.org/project/views
This is the core of the dynamic content for me, as I don't know php or MySQL.

==
I have quickly got fed up with the administration pages styles - all that scrolling to find the save/submit button. So I tried out lots of themes, and settled in the end on channel_nine, which does not have a header. I then modified it to shrink the text in the menu blocks, increase the contrast between text and background, and reduce font size and line-height.

Also made the "clear cache" button on the Performance page fixed absolutely and at the top of the page instead of the bottom. (Next task is to learn how to fiddle with the tpl files so that I can shift the whole section in which the clear cache button sits to the top -- it is going to catch me out soon, having the all the explanatory text but the button not being visible on the screen, since the page is sooo long.)