What Would Drupal Do?

Recently I was contacted by an individual who I have done some Drupal work for in the past. He has an older site that is primarily static HTML with a perl script handling contact form submissions. As most of us experience once a website has become established, he was getting inundated with spam through his contact form.

He was willing - though not overly eager - to implement a CAPTCHA solution but was worried about introducing an extra hurdle for those making casual inquiries. As the various spambots were filling in all the form fields with mostly random garbage and their website links, we decided to just do a validation on the phone number textarea and reject the submission if the phone number validation failed.

Read on for a sample implementation of 'reverse CAPTCHA' aka 'negative CAPTCHA' as an extension to the existing Drupal CAPTCHA module.

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.

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.

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.

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.