del.icio.us needs no introduction, and if you still do not use delicious bookmarking service, there is something obviously missing in your life! Delicious is a famous social bookmarking site that has achieved rapid popularity and growth ever since it was being purchased by Yahoo Inc in 2005. Delicious is my all-time favorite bookmarking service. Many features have contributed to this, including the website’s simple interface, human-readable URL scheme, a novel domain name, a simple REST-like API, and RSS feeds for web syndication. Hence I was really particular about placing a delicious badge in my blog from the very beginning.

As part of my recent blog redesign I’ve searched many places for a nice looking delicious bookmark button which can also display the total bookmark count just like the tweetmeme button. I wanted a button that blends along with other bookmarking buttons such as twitter, digg, facebook etc. A significant amount of my time was spent on googling and browsing through the wordpress plugin directory, but I never found what I wanted.

So finally, I’ve decided to create my own wordpress plugin. After going through some beginner level tutorials on wordpress plugin development nuts and bolts, I have created what I exactly wanted. I am really really happy, that I have become the proud owner of a wordpress plugin
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As most of you are probably aware, Drupal is the best PHP Open Source Content Management System. Most serious big players in the web industry always prefer Drupal over any other CMS applications, mainly because Drupal is more powerful and reliable. But after trying both Drupal & Joomla, I feel like Drupal is really flexible and reliable. But when it comes to user friendliness, Drupal is way behind Joomla. Drupal is such a good CMS system, but it’s not that easy for a beginner to learn it himself. Drupal documentation is not up to the mark for a beginner. So it requires extensive research and lot of googling to master Drupal yourself.

A few months ago, I started learning Drupal theming – I found myself spending a lot of time searching Google for answers to my basic doubts about Drupal. Being self taught, I thought I will archive these questions that troubled me and took up so much of my time. I hope this post would save some Drupal enthusiast some precious time.

Well, here are the questions – go ahead and read

How do I access the Drupal admin panel, when the login block is disabled?

This is really a common question among Drupal beginners; we need not always want the login block to be displayed in our site. Since most of these cases the login block will be turned off in the administration. In those cases, we can access the login screen simply through the following URL.

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http://sitename.com/?q=user

or if the clean URL is enabled

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http://sitename.com/user

Similarly if you can’t access the logout link and need to logout, you can do so by using the URL

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http://sitename.com/?q=logout

alternatively with clean URLs enabled you can try

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http://sitename.com/logout

How to make my Drupal site offline to public, while it is under construction?

You can set your Drupal site in off-line mode, while it is being developed. Just click Administer » Site maintenance. There you can set the status to off-line. If you wants, you can also set your own custom off-line message. When set to Off-line, only users with the administer site configuration permission will be able to access your site to perform maintenance; all other visitors will see the site off-line message configured there. Authorized users can log in during Off-line mode directly via the user login page. Read the rest of this entry »