Starbow Consulting

The Drupal markup filtering system is confusing for a couple of reasons:

• The terms “format” and “filter” are used inconsistently. For example, the main admin page is title “Input formats”, but the url is “admin/settings/filters”. The best I can do is: The markup filter system consists of multiple input formats which are ordered stacks of individual filters.
• The term “Input format” itself is misleading, because the filters work on output, not input.
• The “Input format” admin page is unhelpful and hard to navigate.

Here is a use case that happens to me all the time, and I am boggled that I haven’t found a simpler solution. I have a bunch of Faculty nodes, and I want to specify that some of them belong to various Committees. I want a committees page that has a linked listing of committees, and then each committees page should have a description of the committee and a linked list of all the members. Also it needs to be dead simple for a non-skilled content editor to edit the committee descriptions and to create new faculty without needing to create all the committees ahead of time.

You can do almost all of this with Taxonomy free tagging and Views 2, but the easily editable per-committee description trips you up. For that you need a node type with a Reverse Node Reference. I am open to suggestions, but here is how I do it:

I am really loving the improvements to subthemes in Drupal 6. They took what was an interesting idea in Drupal 5 and made it even more powerful and much easier to use. I have been finding a lot of power rolling out a sets of websites, using subsubthemes.

Theme X: Free theme downloaded from drupal.org
Theme Y: My modifications to that theme, as a subtheme of Theme X. I want these mods to apply to all my subsubthemes. base_theme = Theme X
Themes A, B, & C: The actual themes used on my sites. base_theme = Theme Y

The great thing about this setup is that I can continue to install updates to Theme X, with minimal disruption to my actual sites' themes. There was one problem though:

I was thinking about calling this article "Install Profile Considered Harmful". I know a lot of good people have put a lot of work into this feature, but as of Drupal 6 it seems to be a tar pit. People get excited about creating an install profile, waste some time banging their heads against it, and just move on. It is likely to keep improving, but for the present moment, you can do everything many of the things an install profile does, quicker and easier, by just creating an install module. Here's how.

I have released a new module, Popups: Add and Reference, which solves a problem that has been bugging me for years: creating a reference to a node that does not yet exist. The module adds a link to CCK’s Node Reference widget that makes it easy to add a new node without having to leave the edit page. It is built on top of my Popups module.

Registration for Bay Area Drupal Camp 2008 is open over at
http://badcamp.net/. I recommend signing up quick. We are going to push the attendance cap higher this year, but the camp is still almost a month away, and we already have over 125 people registered. And there is no way the space can handle the 400+ people that just showed up to DrupalCampLA this weekend.

I have recently updated two of my favorite modules.

With some prodding and sponsorship from Initiatives of Change (www.iofc.org), I ported Private Upload to Drupal 6. It turns out there is even more need for this module in D6 than there was in Drupal 5, as D6 out-of-the box offers almost no protection for private files.

I had a little free time today, so I took a look at the new SimpleTest integration for Drupal 7. The SimpleTest framework now comes as a core module, which is a fantastic choice for growing a testing culture. I have only been keeping half-an-eye on the evolution of the testing framework, but I get the impression it bears only a passing resemblance to the original SimpleTest framework.

It looks like you need cURL working with your PHP. Since my dev machine is running XAMPP, all I needed to do was uncomment the line
extension=php_curl.dll

As exciting as the official conference schedule is, the Birds of a Feather sessions could be where things really get done. These will be ad hoc, first-come first served, semi-spontaneous groups. It is kind of hard to see who has proposed one, but this link will show you this list.

I will be hosting two BOF groups

• Modal Dialogs - Working Group for Drupal 7 (changed from Modal Dialogs - Not Just For Evil Anymore)
• Organizing Local Drupal User Groups and Events