Markup validation on an entire Drupal site

With W3C Validator module, you can validate markup on all nodes and views in a Drupal site. I have been on the lookout for several years now for a good tool to validate markup across an entire site. The Drupal module w3c_validator does almost exactly what I want. Prior to discovering this tool, the extent of my use of markup validation was to pass URLs to the the official W3C validator or open one of several validator plugins for various browsers. The W3C Validator module will validate all nodes and views (views without arguments) and report on HTML errors and warnings. The module supports two validation systems - Tidy and the W3C Validator. I installed and configured both. I prefer Tidy because it allows validation of unpublished nodes.

Get W3C Validator module up and running on Ubuntu with Drush

// install Tidy $ sudo apt-get install php5-tidy // restart Apache $ sudo apache2ctl restart // use drush to download the W3C module and enable everything $ drush dl w3c_validator $ drush en w3c_validator $ drush en w3c_validator_site Navigate to admin/settings/w3c_validator and set Tidy to be the provider of the validation service. Allow validation of authenticated pages. Navigate to admin/content/validator/validate and choose your validation settings. Then validate your site. You will likely want to ignore all user generated content and focus on admin created content. For example, it makes little sense to validate forum topics or blog posts, but you will likely want to validate all pages. A 150 node or less brochureware site is the ideal project for this module. After toying around with this module, I have a pretty long wish list of things I want this to do. I'm going to have to hit up the issue queue. I'd love to see a validation fieldset on the node/%/edit page.