Some Common Drupal “Problems” And How to Solve Them

Hi, I am Alec and this is my first blog post. I have been working with Drupal for the past 3 years now and I am passionate about it. In the next few months, I will be writing a series of articles on common problems/ issues encountered by first time Drupal users from time to time.

I have made a list of five and in the coming months, will add more to this list:

1.)The first most common one encountered might be: “Forgot the admin password. What do I do next?"

A simple solution would be to just go to yoursite.com/user/password and follow instructions.

What if for some reason the mail didn’t come due to your Junk mail filter, or you have not installed Drupal mail function. Here are some possibilities, one, you have simply forgotten which email address was used for the admin account, or the mail address that was used no longer exist.

In this scenario, this is what you do. If you have phpmMyAdmin, select the database which Drupal uses from the drop-down menu on the left.

Click on the SQL tab and in the text field on the page type the following text:

update users set pass=md5('YOURPASS') where uid = 1;

where "YOURPASS" is your new administrative password.

and click on the GO button and if no errors present, the Drupal password should have been changed.

2.) Another common problem encountered is – "Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 16088608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate an x number of bytes) or "White Screen of Death"-“I don’t see some pages, and the module page didn’t show".

Here is some information, by the default,16MB of PHP memory is required for Drupal 6, but sometimes you need more than 16MB,

For example:
1.)You are using a lot of contributed modules; 2.)You want to use imageapi, imagecache, or all of these modules; 3.)You are using views+CCK

In this case 16MB will be too low space for your Drupal site, so here's how to increase the PHP memory limit

a) Install this module http://drupal.org/project/drupal_tweaks. And activate it.

but I personally think its better to use this one:

1.setting.phpfile
add the following line at the end of that section:

ini_set('memory_limit', '64M');

note: This method will affect only the site using this file

2.) htaccess file in the Drupal root directory

# Override PHP settings. More in sites/default/settings.php
# but the following cannot be changed at runtime.

after this add the following line:

php_value memory_limit 64M

3.) Ask your hosting company to increase it, or your sysadmin.

P.S. If these methods don’t work. There is a possibility that you have to change hosting provider as well!

3.) Third could be “Oh, I have slow page upload, what do you advice?”

First, I need to say that performance, is most important and serious Drupal problem. And we will later have the full ‘ticks and trips’ article but now most common advices

a.) disable all unused modules. Leave only what you use.

b.) For anonymous userslook at Drupal admin area >Administer > Site configuration > Performance.

And follow instruction on this page, check all boxes that you need but be very carefull with Aggressive caching mode.

One important point, Minimum cache lifetime, don’t forget to set it.

Note. That if you want to use js and css caching you file system Drupal admin area > Administer > Site configuration > File System must work properly and folders on ftp must have right permission.

4.) And some performance secret, "I advice you to disable the Drupal Statistics module". You ask me, why?

Because it tracks every page view and every referrer! Yep it’s cool to know all about your visitors and your website. However, the main problem is that it creats a significant load on the CPU - causing a 30%-40% increase in CPU usage during peak traffic. I recommend you turn the statistics module on from time to time, but keep it usually off.

“And what you advice to use?”

I advice you use an external statistics provider, like Google Analytics.

5.) Last common problem is “How do I optimize my Drupal database?”

The best way is to install the DB Maintenance module http://drupal.org/node/41588.

After activation, go to your Drupal admin area >Administer > Site configuration > DB maintenance. Select the tables which you wish to optimize and click Optimize now.

Thanks for reading my article. I will have more for you in the coming months.