I haven't blogged for a long time, mainly due to workload. The past 2 years found me joining another team, changing a couple of appartments and working more on the backend than ever before.

I also took part in organizing three (3) big Drupal events in Greece: DrupaDay Athens 2016, DrupalCamp Athens 2016 and DrupalDay Patras 2017! DrupalDays are the new trend as it seems, where the local communities try to meet all together and discuss, present, have fun, but they are not Camps. They are being organised with the bare-minimum costs and held in the local language.

Slow query logs are a powerfull tool to monitor your sites bottlenecks. However, unless you wanna be working with old data, you need to rotate them to see if you are actually progressing or not.

When working on sites with thousands or millions of users you have to face a very important problem: your test/dev sites are not allowed to send emails, at all! Develmail and other solutions exist but most of them are very limiting because you end up with text emails and not your nicely styled HTML mail. A way to overcome this problem is by using an external SMTP server that you manage. I'm using iRedmail which works with Postfix. If your server uses postfix then you should be ok in following this guide.

I needed to create a list with the total count of flags, for a specific flag type, made by users. The query to do this for one user is this:
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM flagging WHERE uid=[user_id] AND fid=[flag_id];

Doing this with views, while not very difficult is a bit trivial. You need to start with a node view and not with a user view. From here on things go as follows:

It's been a long time since I wrote something here. This doesn't mean I'm not active with Drupal, on the contrary I'm spending more time than ever with it!

On Monday, along with almost 2000 other attendees I'll be in Amsterdam for this years Drupalcon. The past year found me working for a university site, www.upatras.gr. It is not the first time I've done a site about education but it's been a lot of years since my last one. However, this isn't the project that is taking most of time.

I have created a greek dictionary, in UTF-8, for Vim and I have uploaded it to Github. You can find it here: https://github.com/bserem/vim-greek-spell

It is compatible with Vundle, to automatically install and update it. Checkout Vundle for more information on how to do that, or check my existing Vim configuration here: https://github.com/bserem/vimfiles/blob/master/.vimrc

In Drupal 7, to delete a content that doesn't have a delete link simply do the following steps.

Go to /admin/structure/types and find the machine name of the content type you want to delete.

In the address bar of your browser, append the following line after your domain name:

/admin/structure/types/manage/<content-type-name>/delete

and make sure to replace <content-type-name> with the actual machine name of the content type.

Drupalcon is tomorrow in Prague, and I'm in the city for the last four days. I am really excited, as this will be my first Drupalcon (but not the last).

For the moment I'm at the Hub Praha, along with many other drupalists, for the second sprint day. Everybody here is working hard to make Drupal 8 awesome!

We are all divided among task teams and working with core. Ain't that amazing?

Arch is my distro of choice for several years (since 2006). While it is targeted to advanced users I strongly believe that anybody can use it and he will feel comfortable with it in no time. However, last year Arch developers dropped the curses installation method (AIF) in favor of some installation scripts called from the command line.