DSN Wire - Tutorials

If you are new to drupal, then this list is for you. These are some of the best of the best drupal modules. Everything from standard framework modules, to location and mapping is covered. Note that if you've been emersed in drupal for some time, than this will be "old news". The Big Three "The big three" are important enough that they deserve a category of their own. Most drupal modules worth using have integrated with one of these three.

One of the first lessons they teach you at the School of Drupal Arts, Arcane Sciences and Sorcery is that a tpl.php can have dynamically generated wildcards or "suggestions". You can see this every day drupal themes: you can simply use the "node.tpl.php" file if you want only one style for a node.

*well, probably anything that uses drupal.behaviors... Today, I was doing a few experiments on how to get several giant CCK node forms to load and submit via ajax from a single custom page.When this technique actually worked on the first try, my exact words were "no f#cking s#it..." I'm sure I'm not the first to figure this trick out, but I have had a hard time finding people who've described it.

The mere words "multistep form" once gave me a feeling of dread. There are several techniques (arguably hacks) that enable multistep forms in drupal 6. However, if you've ever used them, you'll know that they are a not techniques for the faint of heart.While Merlinofchaos's multistep form wizard is not for the faint of heart either, I will say I found programming the forms to be fun.

Content type madness is a common disease that effects drupal sites of all sizes. It is most frequently seen in drupal 5 and 6 sites, as result of content construction kit.It is a serious, chronic disease that can result in long term damage to a site's agility, usability , and information architecture. Common symptoms of content type madness include:More than 11 content type* Dubious distinctions between content types [e.g. press release, vs. annoucement, vs. news item, vs.

Highlight: WYSIWYG API Gets Top Spot With 97% Growth (Feb 8th - March 29th)Ever wondered which modules' userbase was growing fastest?With a bit of simpleXML, 2 hours of boredom, and drupal.org's usage charts, I can provide an answer. Personally I thought the results were rather interesting.This list only includes projects that got 6000 downloads or more last week. I picked 6000, because otherwise, ubercart wouldn't show up.read more

The phpdocs put it kind of weirdly: PHP 5 comes with a complete reflection API that adds the ability to reverse-engineer classes, interfaces, functions and methods as well as extensions. I prefer the notorious c.h.x.'s definitionchx: it's like this insane cool weaponset of PHP which is like totally unknown :)Reflection is a very powerful too that lets you understand the code running in your enviroment.

While building a product comparison website, I ran into a situation that required a view to sort using one of 2 possible price totals depending on a users profile: lets say "red state", "blue state".

During the drupal.org redesign process, I noticed that Mark Boulton was using blueprint. I decided to give it a spin, and used it on a drupal site for a surgeon who specializes in sports medicine. (heavy use of imagecache, nodequeue, views, books, and nicemenus). Since that project, my stance on blueprint is this:you'll take my CSS framework from cold dead hands.Is there a drupal theme?

How Do You Teach Drupal Without Inducing Confusion/Boredom Triggered Comas?

You don't need a crazy CSS framework to make multi-column CSS layouts easy. They already *are* easy.If you feel skeptical about my claim, I don't blame you.

When Bad Hosts (Yahoo Small Business) Happen to Good Drupal SitesTime and again, I work for a client who is stuck with a horrid server environment -- say -- Yahoo Small Business.* Surely you must think that a company like Yahoo -- who employs none other than Rasmus Lerdorf -- would offer a decent environment. That's where you'd be wrong.Its so bad that Drupal 6 won't even allow itself to ATTEMPT an installation. And with good reason.

Today, I was working with drupal 6's AHAH form elements. Initially, I was delighted at how well they worked. That delight turned to confusion once I realized that the form elements I had put in the menu callback of the #ahah['path'] was missing its name attribute. After doing a bit of research in how the poll module handled the formapi voodoo, I created a generalized function to aid in building AHAH callbacks. If there is a better way to do this, I wasn't able to find it.read more

On the #drupal IRC channel, Excallibur points out that there are no coding standards for CSS. I'd like to propose some straightforward ones. Note that I am not intentionally omitting indentation within rules, but am having trouble with my code filter. I. CSS is not Java.This java-style of CSS does not make the code easier to read: #rule1{ margin:0px;}It just adds an unnecessary space. Below is the correct way, which is consistent with core CSS. #rule1 { margin:0px; padding:1em;}II.

The other day, I was tasked with building a data scraper. Having never built such a contraption, I naturally turned to the Internets for preexisting code. I was horrified with what I found. The “free” PHP scripts (that’s “free” as in “free baby vomit”) were all infested with the worst sorts of newfangled regex, and PHP 4 era DOM traversing.

In our last episode of enabling new modules via update.php, Steve McKenzie pointed me to a better method: module_enable(). A quick test found, however, that it didn't run the install files, and didn't rebuild the module files cache. So after spending 5 minutes in system.module, I found all the missing pieces. The example update function below will install and enable the new module, as well as rebuild all the css, node type, and menu caches.

In our last episode of enabling new modules via update.php, Steve McKenzie pointed me to a better method: module_enable(). A quick test found, however, that it didn't run the install files, and didn't rebuild the module files cache. So after spending 5 minutes in system.module, I found all the missing pieces. The example update function below will install and enable the new module, as well as rebuild all the css, node type, and menu caches.

UPDATE: There's a better way.I work with 3 other developers, all of whom have their own local sandbox of our site. Since we're constantly adding new modules, I found a simple way to enable a new module via another module's .install file. That way, all we have to do is run update.php when we update our source tree.Here's a simple example update function:<?

UPDATE: There's a better way.I work with 3 other developers, all of whom have their own local sandbox of our site. Since we're constantly adding new modules, I found a simple way to enable a new module via another module's .install file. That way, all we have to do is run update.php when we update our source tree.Here's a simple example update function:<?

I remember something a long time teacher said, "Nick, if you make a suit out of a gorrilla, the arms are too long." I forgot why that was relevent to the topic of theming menu trees.Moving on, here's a nice little function I wrote to return a themed menu tree by path.read more