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drupal planet

Posted by jcfiala

Here's where I'm posting the various files that I promised to deliver - these are the files I used in my DrupalCamp Colorado 2010 presenation on extending Solr.

Posted by jcfiala

The sheer size of Drupal, and of DrupalconSF, was brought rudely to your attention as you walked into exhibit hall A, which looked to be about the size of room you would need to store a few decently sized airplanes, and saw the rows and rows of chairs set out for people to sit back and hear Dries talk about the State of Drupal.

In short, he thinks it's doing pretty good.

Posted by jcfiala

When I first started working in Drupal, I was astonished to hear that the logging function that Drupal provides is called - of all things - watchdog(). I complained that it was a bad name, but continued using it, along with the dblog module, happily throwing things into the watchdog table and looking them up there.

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Posted by jcfiala

Firehouse.com, the last major project I worked on with pingVision, has now been officially launched! I worked as lead developer on this project with the able assistance of Matthew Saunders & Elizabeth Hause on the web producing side; and Ben Jeavons, Matt Tucker, Al Stephen, Kevin Bridges and Zach Meyer on the development and theming side.

Firehouse is a large site which includes articles of fires and fire-handling topics, pages for each fire station who wants to be hosted there, photographs of stations and fire equipment submitted by users, editorial cartoons on the firefighting life, Webinars, an online store for buying subscriptions to the magazine, and even A digital copy of their magazine, month by month, and probably some other stuff I'm not even remembering. Oh, and some blogging, too.

I'll probably work up more of a 'this is how we done it' post later, right now I'm basking in the glow of success.

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Dasfa.com Gone Live!

03 Aug 2009
Posted by jcfiala

After a bit of twisting and forcing, I've got the new http://www.dasfa.com/ up and running under Drupal, a feat which makes me feel rather happy. DASFA stands for the 'Denver Area Science Fiction Association', and I've been slowly taking over the webmaster duties for a while now.

I still need to get dasfa.org migrated as well, but there's some email forwarding accounts that I need to get sorted out first. But it shouldn't take too long.

Also, I've set up a new twitter account: http://www.twitter.com/denver_sf to keep track of local Denver SF happenings.

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Posted by jcfiala

Here's the talk we gave at Drupalcampcolorado.

Presentation at http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dxmgvdn_4c2mfkkdj

(If you're seeing this on livejournal, there's files to download on www.jcfiala.net)

Posted by jcfiala

A couple of quite notes for those of you trying to use drupal_add_tabledrag() on your sites, that may prevent you suffering through the same pain as myself... but I'll hide it after the break for those of you who don't care and want to get on to the next bit.

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Posted by jcfiala

Setting up a view these days with Views2 can get you 90-95% of the way to what your client, or you, want, but sometimes you've got to go in and make a few tweaks to customize a view to what's needed. One hook that's useful for customizing is hook_views_pre_execute(&$view).

In this helpful hook, you can add something to the foot of your view by using the $view->attachment_after property and setting it to the proper html, or to the head by using the $view->attachment_before property. You can also adjust what the view is doing, and since this is before the query execution, you can easily change settings such as the number of rows being returned.

Posted by jcfiala

I've got two Drupal modules that depend on reading through text to do something useful - the first is the 'Drupal Markup Engine', or dme, and the second is currently called 'pingv_coder', an extension to coder to check for what I think are poor programming practices, which isn't done yet.

In both of them I'm currently using regexp to scan and look for what I need - in the first I'm using some truly twisted regular expressions to find and isolate the tags that are left in the text. DME allows programmers to define custom tags in the format of <dme:tagname/> or <dme:tagname&gt...</dme:tagname>, and the code looks for these tags with regex. At the time I started, I read a lot of sites saying that parsing html-like or xml-like tags with regex wasn't the right way to go, and as I've improved and used my code, it seems more and more that that's true. It works well for the simple cases, but when you have tags nested inside of other tags, you start running into problems making sure you've got the right things nested. Happily, for the production sites we've used it in, the tags have been very simple, on the order of 'put this image here' and so on, and so there haven't been any problems.