Force by Forcewest: Salesforce Developer meetup

Thursday May 31st @ 6pm in The Elephant, Bristol

It's that time again, time for me to sell my soul and advertise another group meet-up in the South West of England.

This time, the group is Force by Forcewest, it's an-off shoot of the original Salesforce user group, Forcewest, and it's really intended just for the technically minded. No old admins in battered ties, or accountants talking about licence costs, just developers, coders and hackers (ethical, of course) talking about Apex, Workflow and Visualforce.

So if you live anywhere near Bristol and you know how important semi-colons are, then write "May 31st - FxFw" on a post-it note and stick it to your monitor. We'll be meeting in The Elephant pub, in St. Nicks market, please come on down and join us for a couple of beers, and to meet like minded people.

 Sign up for more info on the usual channels:

http://www.facebook.com/ForceByForceWest
http://twitter.com/fxfwbarman

and actually sign up (for free!)

http://fxfw1.eventbrite.com/

but more importantly just head to this pub:

 

Developer certification is certainly not a must (I'm not even a certified developer!) but you might find the more badges, and the more merch you can drop into the conversation, the more likely you are to be bought a pint by me :D

Drupal cron stopped working after site migration

Have you recently moved your Drupal website to a new server, and all of a sudden Cron has stopped working, and all your jobs are timing out, or locking up?

That has recently happened to me.

First of all, I will point out that I am using Drupal 7, and we are managing a number of jobs using the Ultimate Cron module, which as you may know, is dependant on the Background Process (and Progress) module(s). We migrated our site from a test server to a live server, with identical setup, and all of a sudden, our cron jobs packed in. I couldn't run them automatically, manually, externally, with drush or even from the root shell.

For a day I struggled. With every CRON setting I could imagine.

Then, whilst manually trawling through the system and variable tables in the database I discovered the following setting:

background_process_derived_default_host | a:1:{s:7:"default";a:1:{s:8:"base_url";s:20:"http://test.desynit.com";}}

http://test.desynit.com is the name server of test site (obviously). This is not the path of the live server.

So I leapt into the admin config for the BACKGROUND PROCESS module, and lo and behold, there it was..

I clicked "Determine default service host" and this was instantly updated to the new correct base_url for the live server, and away you go!

Full cron ahead.

I hope this helps someone out.