San Antonio Web Development

Fix Drupal Admin Panel after installing jQuery Update Module

// October 8th, 2010 // Programming, Web Design, Web Development

If you’re anything like me, then you love the jQuery library. It makes what would be extremely complicated web design tasks simple. Recently I was working on a client’s website based off of the Drupal 6 content management system, which comes prepackaged with jQuery 1.2.6. Normally this would be fine, but we needed to use some of the jQuery UI tools that are only supported in jQuery 1.3.2+. So I downloaded the jQuery Update Module and decided to download the most recent version of jQuery (1.4.2).

This seemed to work without a hitch. However a few days later, I needed to do some resorting of my menus. For some reason, the icons to sort my menus had disappeared. This also happened when trying to sort blocks. I spent a good couple of days diagnosing the problem before I discovered the reason it was happening. Drupal 6 was designed to work with jQuery 1.2.6, not jQuery 1.4.2. While jQuery isn’t all the critical on the front-end of a Drupal site out of the box, it makes up for a good portion of the administrative functionality. I couldn’t revert to the old version of jQuery, because I needed the functionality from the newer version.
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Trick Drupal 6 to Allow Links to Relative, Non-Drupal Paths

// September 28th, 2010 // Programming, Web Development

For some reason, when using “clean urls” Drupal 6 seems to think you can only have two kinds of links: Internal to Drupal or external links. This means that if you have something not part of Drupal installed on the same site, you would have to use the full URL to link to it.

For example, say you have a Drupal website called www.somedrupal6site.com and a non-Drupal page called just_some_page.php that you would like to be in the main navigation. So you try adding it to through the Drupal menu manager and you end up with this fun little error:

So how do you fix it? Well if you’re okay with putting in full URLs, then you can put: http://www.somedrupal6site.com/just_some_page.php as the path. Drupal will recognize that as an external URL and it’s good to go.

Unfortunately this isn’t always a viable solution. The site I was working on when this problem arose used multiple domains and CCK to differentiate content for each domain. They were technically separate sites with a lot of common data, which is why they used the same Drupal installation. At this point, I couldn’t just put the absolute URL, because there were 4 different absolute URLs instead of 1.
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