Web Tech

If your Drupal powered web site suddenly quits running it's cron jobs (you'll see log entries complaining that the task has taken over an hour, or cannot run cron while it's already in progress) you'll probably have a hard time trying to figure out what part of the cron job is hanging it. I know I did.

Here's how to diagnose the problem:

Inside your site's includes folder is a file called module.inc, make a copy of it, and restore this file after the problem is corrected. Now open module.inc and change the part that says:

function module_invoke_all() {
$args = func_get_args();
$hook = $args[0];
unset($args[0]);
$return = array();
foreach (module_implements($hook) as $module) {
$function = $module .'_'. $hook;
$result = call_user_func_array($function, $args);
if (isset($result) && is_array($result)) {
$return = array_merge_recursive($return, $result);
}
else if (isset($result)) {
$return[] = $result;
}
}

return $return;
}

To this code I found buried in the Drupal discussion boards:

function module_invoke_all() {
$args = func_get_args();
$hook = $args[0];

For a variety of reasons I needed to allow people to have encrypted connections to RenditonsDesign.com, so I required a decent SSL certificate. The problem is, you can spend well over $1,000 on these things if you demand a brand-name certificate authority (I wish that was a doctored screen shot). They cost even more if you have multiple domain names you need to secure, like AlGore.org and AlGoreDemcocrats.com for example, both pointing to the same site. And if you want to save money, you may want to buy multiple years. Yeah, I played with the options and easily rung up more than $12,000.00 at Verisgn! Yikes. Is a certificate really worth as much as 4,000 copies of iKnew That!?

The MacOS is epic, we all know that. Drupal is fairly epic too. It's a powerful open source content management system used by hundreds of thousands of great sites, like The Whitehouse, FedEx, and Popular Science. But hosting Drupal on Mac OS Server is less than simple I'm afraid.