What Would Drupal Do?

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.

I previously demonstrated how to build a personal nodetracker using CCK, Views, and the Views Bonus Pack.

But it's no fun to have to open up your website, log in, go into the create content section, and manually type in all the information every time you want to keep track of a Drupal.org node.

Well, with a bit of Javascript hackery and the prepopulate module, we are freed from such dreary tasks.

This can be used for any sort of node type. I'm using the node tracker here as a generic example.

Thomas Narres has put up some early video coverage of various presentations from DrupalCon 2006.

The quality is low, and it is difficult to make out the slides and such, but it provides a good sampling of what is to come.

Full list of available video here, and you can find a copy of the slides to accompany the jQuery presentation here.

Quite a number of new modules have come out in September. Click on a module name below to jump to its description, or scroll down for the full list. If I've missed one that you wrote or know about, let me know through the contact form.

I've received a number of emails since the launch of What Would Drupal Do regarding my personal nodetracker (see the righthand side of the screen, towards the bottom) [...]

Here is how it's done.