Posted
6 days
ago
All databases I am aware of work based on CRUD: Create, Read, Update, Delete. Drupal always wanted to implement all of them nicely and now we have a nice Read in Drupal 7 with entity loading. Delete API has a very long and very sad history which I
... [More]
won't get into but we tried to introduce Delete API to make undo possible. As teached by many excellent usability books, confirm forms are wrong, they become habitual and are just a nuisance instead of protecting you from mistakes. The computer should just do what its operator says and make it possible to revert easily.
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Posted
6 days
ago
Sat, Dec 5, 2009 by JF
Perl has been at the root of web development since the beginning: even Amazon is built on Perl. Today, Perl gives you access via CPAN to a set of over 18,000 mature modules on just about anything. There is even an
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Acme:: namespace reserved for joke modules.
Perl has a lots of benefits for a Drupal developer. First, the syntax of PHP has been greatly influenced by Perl, so most PHP programmers should feel comfortable in Perl. It is easy to install extra Perl modules on any Linux distribution from the command-line using CPAN, or on share hosts using the administration interface. And Perl is faster than PHP, which makes it an excellent candidate for the heavy-lifting part of a website.
Let's build a small perl script to:
Log into a website
Parse a page and search for specific content
Format the content as an RSS feed
Load the feed into Drupal
This solution would be extremely simple to build using only four Perl CPAN modules. Here is how it goes: [Less]
Posted
6 days
ago
As some of you may have already noticed, we re-launched our Web site right before Thanksgiving last week. This has been a long-overdue project for us; our existing site design dated back to 2005, and received its most recent major
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update in early March of 2008, when I took responsibility for porting it to Drupal 6, which had only been released only two weeks earlier.
At that point, very few of the major contributed modules, like Views and CCK, had been ported to Drupal 6, so my only choice at the time was to build the site almost entirely from core modules, like the built-in Blog module. Now, there’s nothing wrong with using those core modules for basic site-building, but as the site grew, and we wanted to do more with it, their limitations soon became apparent. Also, the fact that I had put the site together very quickly in a decidedly non-sustainable manner meant that it was very difficult to extend or add new functionality as time went by.
This time around, we decided to approach our own Web site like we would any other project at Palantir, employing our full iterative development process. [Less]
Posted
7 days
ago
Fri, Dec 4, 2009 by Afraaz
Recently I was working on a project where users were able to upload videos, the format in our case didn't matter since we were uploading to Youtube anyway. Allowing users to upload videos was easily done with the
... [More]
Video Upload module and the CCK module. This module allowed us to upload videos directly to our Youtube account. From here, we waited for the next cron run and the video's would be processed, published and viewable by users of the site. Fast, simple, and all done without any custom coding, sweet! [Less]
Posted
7 days
ago
Something I've hated about running community sites on Drupal is the cursed Spam Link Deterrent filter.
The idea behind this filter is that it applies rel="nofollow" to any links in user-generated content. And the reason this is necessary is
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that when you have a membership site and you allow users to create content on it, you inadvertently attract spammers who want to drop links back to their own site.
By applying the nofollow attribute, you are telling search engines not to count that link as 'editorially approved' - therefore, the spammer doesn't derive any value from the link. The problem with the Spam Link Deterrent is that it's an all or nothing solution - even internal links to other content on the site get this added to them. This means that your site loses a lot of value from natural internal links.
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Posted
7 days
ago
New release of Strongarm for Drupal lets modules enforce variable settings
I've just rolled the first beta release of Strongarm 2. The basic premise of Strongarm is that if we had a "real" variable system in Drupal, we
... [More]
could provide default values for a specific site. In the absence of such a system, we can use Strongarm and just force certain values. The goal of this is to make it easier to provide a bunch of variable settings with a feature so that things can work properly with no additional configuration on the part of whoever enables a module. For install profiles like Open Atrium and Managing News, this functionality was crucial in creating a solid out of the box experience.
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Posted
7 days
ago
New release of Strongarm for Drupal lets modules enforce variable settings
I've just rolled the first beta release of Strongarm 2. The basic premise of Strongarm is that if we had a "real" variable system in Drupal, we
... [More]
could provide default values for a specific site. In the absence of such a system, we can use Strongarm and just force certain values. The goal of this is to make it easier to provide a bunch of variable settings with a feature so that things can work properly with no additional configuration on the part of whoever enables a module. For install profiles like Open Atrium and Managing News, this functionality was crucial in creating a solid out of the box experience.
read more [Less]
Posted
7 days
ago
Learn how Drupal works by building a site
Having trouble figuring out how to harness the power of Drupal? Join Lullabot for our two day, hands-on workshop and we'll walk you through which modules to use, what configuration
... [More]
is required and how to build an awesome site just the way you want it.
»
Tempe, AZ - February 8th & 9th, 2010
[Less]
Posted
7 days
ago
Learn how Drupal works by building a site
Having trouble figuring out how to harness the power of Drupal? Join Lullabot for our two day, hands-on workshop and we'll walk you through which modules to use, what configuration
... [More]
is required and how to build an awesome site just the way you want it.
»
Tempe, AZ - February 8th & 9th, 2010
[Less]
Posted
7 days
ago
Some of you'll are aware of the work i've done for The San Francisco School using Drupal 6.x / CiviCRM 2.2. You can read more technical details about this project on my blog.
Database
Maintain name/email/phone/address information
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for people associated with the school (students, staff and parents)
Maintain relationships between parents and their children
Maintain relationships between a teacher / advisor and their students
Current Features deployed at SFS
Give all parents and staff a login/password
Online signups for all Parent Teacher Conferences
Online signups for all extended care activity (classes after school)
Sign-in / Sign-out for students attending extended care
Computation of how many "activity" blocks a student has spent on extended care
Parent viewing of the various extended care activities their kids have attended in the past
Online maps of "Where we Live" of the school families
Online directories of the schools and grades.
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