2008

I set up a quick and dirty file sharing site the other day. It was pretty easy, though I did have to make one small custom module.

Another project for the end of September was a redesign/re-engineering of http://inspire4life.org. The old site had grown organically, the way the stuff at the back of the fridge does. It needed a big overhaul in time for their autumn event, the Puck-Putt challenge.

We had some pro-bono help from PARTNERS+simons (hooray), which laid out the basic look, feel, and structure. We were not bound to their designs, but it was great to have a stable platform to build on.

I spent a good portion of last weekend (the end of September) rewriting the donation form for http://supportunitedway.org. Here were the "exciting" parts:

• Various URL variables affect how the form displays and validates itself, so we can use one module for lots of different forms now.

I set up Alternate Login on http://supportunitedway.org recently. Everyone's user names are their full names, but they want to log in with first initial last name anyway. It's sort of funny how we're more used to that now than our own names.

Anyway after the install I took an export of the users table, with UID and email, stripped off the domain name, and imported it into the alt_login table. Worked a charm!

I set up knurl on castlin.net today, so I have my own TinyURL-like functionality. Please reference the site's tagline, above.

I really need to figure a better way to manage parent/child relationships. I was not a big fan of any of the modules I tried out, but maybe they merit another review. I want two things:

• bi-directional node reference fields
• field accessibility from either side of that link

If there were way to override or define new handlers for fields, the second would be pretty easy. For now I will have to make do with theming individual fields. I'll have to give some more thought to the first one.

I spent most of this week banging out a contracts request, approval, and tracking system. Most of the tools were readily available in Drupal and just needed some modifications to meet specific business rules. I tried very hard on this project to do things "the Drupal way": override instead of edit, no logic in the theme layer, etc.

Here is a quick module for Drupal 5 to allow you to drill down on your top errors and see what their top referrers are. In this way it should be easy to find where the problems are coming from so you can fix them.

Needs documentation and testing, but the options to drill down show up under admin/logs/page-not-found/drill and admin/logs/access-denied/drill.

I spent some time today reworking the ecard module, knowing I'm going to need something similar at work. The main changes are:

• A few more configurable language bits, like the thank you message.
• md5-based URLs of the form ecard/view/message_hash/pickup_hash.
• A tracker that records sends, recipients, and pickups so you can tell which ecards are most popular.