This happens to be extremely important in aging websites. As a website progresses in its life, its owners often request things to be modified and changed. Perhaps a new image added to that page, and another bullet point to the frequent asked questions page, or to create another page, etc. This is certainly not uncommon. But what happens is that the design itself starts to look like a Frankenstein and its look goes BAD.

So here are some tips to prevent those things from happening:

Tips:

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Ok, so if you decide to use Drush (4) and decide to upgrade your installation of Drupal (6.2x) then perhaps you’ll experience a little problem. This problem has happened to me quite a few times now and that is why I am writing this post. I don’t want this to happen either to me or to anybody in the future. If it happens, then here are the instructions on how to fix it.
Let’s start by saying what doesn’t work:
1. My first thought was to check for the error log to see if it gave me better clues at what was happening with the Drupal site after the drush update command (drush up). Now, before we continue, remember that before you hit ENTER on that command, make a copy of your htaccess file and of your robots.txt. Believe me, this will make it easier on you.

2. I checked the error log and it basically told me the following:
“[Date [crit] [client 200.111.222.111(ip address)] (13)Permission denied: /home/user/public_html/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable”.

3. I thought then that it had to do with the permissions of the htaccess file (chmod). However that is not what causes the problem.
4. When I tried that it didn’t work.
5. Then I changed the ownership of the files recursively on the entire root and sure enough it didn’t work either. Simply because the problem happens because the public_html folder alone has to have the group ownership set to “nobody”. Can you believe that? How do you do that? With the command “chown” (Change Ownership) the first parameter is the username, the second one is the group. So for example if you say chown alex:nobody myfolder/ , then you are assigning the ownership of myfolder/ to user alex and group “nobody”.

Why does it happen in the first place?

First the problem happens because you are logged it with a different user with SSH into your server. That alone is going to make the Drush calls from that user. So if you call the drush commands without changing your user, of course you are going to end you changing your ownership of the files.

Merkados’ Recommended Solution

So here are the changes that need to happen:

/*Comment of Code*/
#chown -R ftp_username:ftp_username path_to_drupal_home_folder
#chown ftp_username:nobody path_to_drupal_home_folder
/*End of Code*/

Notes:

1. The chown command is used to change the ownership of the files. In the first line you are changing ownership recursively of all the drupal files and assigning it to the user with ftp access and group with the same name.

2. The second line makes the change to the home folder. Please note that the group is set to “nobody” and please also note that it is not recursive so don’t use the -R!

That’s it. If you follow this instructions you will be avoiding those 403 forbidden notices and doing more work. Don’t worry about the fact that the error logs instruct you about lack of read-access to .htaccess. Obviously this problem is generated by the ownership problem described here. Once you fix the problem with the ownership, then you won’t have the error with your htaccess file.

Please don’t hesitate to contact Merkados for your strategic interactive media needs.

So go ahead and visit the xDebug Wizard first. Then head to your local machine and create a simple php script with the following:

    phpinfo();

2. Ok so now go ahead and save your php script somewhere accessible by your local web server. Now head to your browser and run the script. Select all the output and paste it in the textarea box at the xdebug wizard.

3. Now, xdebug is going to give you tailored instructions on how to proceed from here. HOWEVER, at the end of the instructions you will need to do another step.

4. Head to Komodo IDE’s download page and click on the PHP debugging extension for MAC OS.

5. Once you have the download take the xdebug.so located in the package, and place this into
/Applications/MAMP/Library/share/php/xdebug.so

6. Edit your /Applications/MAMP/conf/php5/php.ini like so:

; xdebug
zend_extension=/Applications/MAMP/Library/share/php/xdebug.so
xdebug.remote_enable=1
xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp
xdebug.remote_mode=req
xdebug.remote_host=127.0.0.1
xdebug.remote_port=9000
xdebug.idekey=

7. Restart your Server and re-run your phpinfo() script.

8. You should now see the extension running properly.

Day 1. In the morning: Have a cup of coffee and a bagel with creme cheese. Ok, ready with that? Perfect. Now go ahead and sit back for 1 hour and take in this introductory video. It starts by telling you the very basics of jQuery:

After watching the previous video you should have a good understanding of how jquery works and what it does. Next is to start to practice with selections. So go ahead and create an html document with at least one div with an ID. Then make sure that you can select the div by id and that you can perform a method on it, perhaps animate it. That is it. Once you have the $().something(); clear in your mind the it is time to move on.

2. Go ahead and take a look at using Jquery with AJAX. Ajax is one of the most exciting technologies of the WEB2.0 wave. Don’t reload your pages when all you want is to refresh one element: use AJAX!

Alright, awesome. Now that you have an introduction of AJAX and the load method, it is time to practice. To practice with the load method do the following:

1. Create an xhtml file with some content in it.

2. Create a second xhtml file with an unordered list that contains li elements.

3. Now make a call using the load method from the first html. Load the elements in your main html. Now make the document.ready.

That is it.