blog

ecard

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.

Revisionary

in

http://drupal.org/project/revisionary

I got my drupal.org CVS account today, and created a project for revisionary. It's exciting to be able to offer back something that others may find useful. As part of the process, sadly, I fat-fingered the word "module" and created a new directory at cvs.drupal.org; "contributions/moudles/". I have some support requests in to fix it: hope they come through soon :/

Revision rights by content type

I needed to allow revision viewing and reverting (but not deleting) for only one content type (a wiki). The solution turned out to be in hook_menu and module weights, and overriding Drupal's menu structure for the revisions of wikis.

Toggling TinyMCE and formatting tips

In an effort to reduce clutter on the average user's node creation form, I wanted to hide the formatting tips when TinyMCE was active. There's little reason for them to see Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically. etc. when they have a nice wysiwyg running already. Turning the editor off, however, should bring the tips back.

OG forums; no extra modules*

I figured a way to create per-organic group specified forums, with no extra modules needed*. You will, however, have to apply this patch. It gives Views more respect for the $group placeholder. I am not using the core Forum module, but would be interested to see if this worked with it.

I developed this because I was worried about my users understanding the OG Taxonomy or OG forum modules. With this, they only see a few extra text fields when defining their group, and a pull-down when creating their topics.

supportunitedway.org case study

This is a writeup of how and why United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack valley chose Drupal for the redesign of supportunitedway.org. I'll talk about our history with Drupal, how we structured the new site, which modules we used, and how we migrated data from our old site.

stupid color trick

in

I had to generate ~unique colors for various nodes recently. So I used:

<?php
'#' . substr(md5($node->title), 0, 6)
?>

Some of the colors are hideous, but they're relatively distinct within a collection of nodes.

Development & Production Sites with Database Prefixes

I'm playing around on a couple of test sites with an idea I had during a BoF at Drupalcon. Running two sites off the same database and prefixing certain tables should allow for a simple dev/prod environment.

The idea is to isolate the configurations for the two different sites in two differently prefixed sets of tables, and allow all the content, users, taxonomy, etc. to mingle. To test this I've set up two subdomains, dev1.castlin.net and dev2.castlin.net. Here is the entry in settings.php for dev2 (dev1 is strikingly similar):

A little polish

I spent a bit of time today updating my portfolio, and finally got my Drupal Association membership established.