What Would Drupal Do?

Owing to a long development period, and several changes of the core development team, we have a lot of leftover Views that are no longer being used. However, with pages upon pages of them and quite a large site, it isn't always immediately apparent which Views are still needed and which aren't.

Here is a very small module I quickly threw together yesterday to track when Views are called/rendered and generate a report at /admin/views_audit. I doubt that there is enough general need for this to put it in contrib, but someone out there might get some use of it.

It should be just as happy running on 4.7 as 5.

I don't usually use this space for this type of thing, but we are currently seeking a CSS ninja for immediate work. Drupal know-how is a definite plus (and if you are reading this, you probably have that).

Solid performance will almost certainly result in repeat work.

Use the contact form if you are available and interested. It would be helpful to quote your rates and provide a couple of urls to finished projects.

I've been developing an AJAX module for a client that needs to run on both Drupal 5 and Drupal 4.7. Unfortunately, the jQuery 4.7 module uses the now well outdated 1.0.3 version of jQuery and I was finding a number of incompatibilities cropping up between the more recent Drupal 5 version and the older Drupal 4.7 version.

Here's a simple way to bring your Drupal 4.7 up to date with the current version of jQuery, and to allow for simple upgrades when new versions of the library are released.

Here's a wacky idea - arbitrary attributes that can be assigned on an individual node basis.

Even wackier - a brokerage system to allow these attributes to be globally registered.

What do I mean, and what's the point?

Right now, developers do all sorts of strange things to coax desired behaviour out of Drupal. Consider the case of featured content. You want certain types of content to be "featured", and you want to perform certain types of actions for featured content that you don't want to perform for other content. Perhaps a graphic next to the title in a teaser view.

There are countless ways that a scenario like this gets tackled, three in particular which are most common. I don't think any of them are adequate.

After having taken a few unexpected months off from most Drupal activities, I've been dipping my toes back into the water this week.

It's great to see that Drupal 5.0 has been officially let loose into the world. I'd played with and tested some of the pre-release dev versions, so it isn't entirely new territory for me, but I've still got a bit of catching up to do. I'm working on the first production site with 5.0, and I'm loving it. Cheers to everyone who has worked so hard to make it happen.

So that's the good.

The "not so good" is the spam on this pre-5.0 era blog. Lots of it!

Due to medical concerns that require my attention at this time, I am hoping to find someone with the available time to help to maintain the Voting module, or to take it over outright.

At present, I already have too much catching up to do and more immediately pressing matters to attend to and am unable to spend the time on the project that it requires.

If interested, please contact me through the contact form here

It's hard to believe that another month has gone by already. Here's the list of new modules released in October. There are a few in particular that stand out.

ohloh.com is an interesting little website that has spurred some chatter on the Drupal dev mailing list. It claims to "map the open source world" by "collecting objective information on open source projects."

It analyzes the codebase and contributions for a project and spits out some interesting data. A particularly charming feature is that it estimates the number of collective man hours that have gone into a given project, and tallies what it might cost to have such a project developed.

After clicking around a bit, I couldn't help but wonder how Drupal stacked up against that other popular CMS, Joomla(!). All in good fun of course, and the ohloh data should be read with your trusty salt lick on hand.

Nicholas Thompson has just committed a new module called Global Redirect.

Essentially, the module checks to see if a given node url has been assigned an alias, and if so, uses a permanent redirect to that alias. Currently if you are using url aliasing - say through the path_auto module - you are left with the old numberic url ("node/1234") and the new aliased url. Thus you risk being punished by Uncle Google for serving duplicate content.

This is part three of a series. If you haven't already, you might be interested in reading previous articles.

• Part 3: Catching Duplicates With hook_form_alter()
• Part 2: How To Create a Bookmarklet
• Part 1: How To Build A Personal Nodetracker

In this tutorial, we are going to implement the hook_form_alter() function to test for duplicate entries based on a form field.

I'll be using the nodetracker content type that we built in previous tutorials for demonstration purposes, but the general method is applicable to any form or content type within Drupal.