LAMP

The Problem:
Displaying a random image from the image field in a certain node type (where not every node has an image) in a block.

My Solution:
1. First thing is create a view with the following "Default" settings:

Add the following function to the template.php for your theme:

function yourthemename_preprocess_page(&$vars, $hook) {
 if (isset($vars['node'])) {
 // If the node type is "blog" the template suggestion will be "page--blog.tpl.php".
  $vars['theme_hook_suggestions'][] = 'page__'.$vars['node']->type;
 }
}
 
Change the "yourthemename" in the function name to match the name of your theme.

By default, a Drupal 7 image field that is set to contain multiple images, will display all of the images in both the teaser and full node view. While desirable, there is no option when creating a view to only show the first image in the teaser. This can be accomplished, however, with the new Drupal 7 field-level template-hint.

In order do this globally for a field named "field image" the following code in a template file named "field--field_image.tpl.php"

<div class="<?php print $classes; ?> clearfix"<?php print $attributes; ?>>

There is a problem with the Drupal aggregator module stripping out HTML escape codes (i.e. &lt; &gt; & etc.) from RSS feeds when using PHP <= 5.2.6 with libxml2 >= 2.6.32.

This is due to an intentional change in the behaviour of libxml2 after version 2.6.32. Some sites suggest reverting to libxml2-2.6.30 - while this works as a temporary solution, it is no longer necessary or advisable.

It was time to do an OS upgrade on a webserver I maintain that hosts a couple of reasonably active sites. The two most active sites on the server bring in about 12,000 unique visitors a month, with the two serving up about 4 million hits. Of course this is small potatoes compared to the really big boys, but between the two of them it is pretty much given that there is somebody hitting the server at any given moment and the demographics are such that there is really no reasonable time for the server to be down for any length of time.