I just found out a very strange PHP feature by browsing the PHP-GTK2 API with the Reflection classes : spaces can be used in some alien places, like variable names.

But the doc says you can't !

Well, try this in PHP 5.2.5, for instance:

In summer 2006, I created the img_relocator module, which was published to my sandbox, and apparently picked up by some Drupal admins, although it was never promoted to full-fledged project status.

I was working on an existing site today, and after installing the e-commerce 3.4 suite (EC), noticed something was very weird: product type modules were enabled, all basic EC modules were there too, and yet, when I created products by hand, the "Anonymous purchase" fieldset appeared, but nothing else from EC.

Worse, when saving the new products, they were properly created in the {node} table, but never appeared in the {ec_product} table, which caused them never to appear as products in the admin products list of the product view available to users. What could be going on ?

The OSInet team recently attended Solutions Linux, a trade fair focused on FLOSS, and while chatting with a sales engineer from a company specialized in Typo3, got asked which CMS we used, and of course answered "Drupal".

At that point, that person flinched somehow, acknowledging that Drupal was indeed one of the "Big 3" in the CMS space, along with Typo3 and Joomla, but was plagued with security issues making it rather unfit for professional deployment, as opposed to Typo3, which took security issues seriously. Continuing the discussion, it appeared that company has indeed at least acquired some Drupal knowhow too, due to customer request, but the person doing the criticizing was not directly familiar with Drupal.

Having recently merged a number of separately configured sites into a single consolidated multisite, I found myself with URLs like:

http://www.site1.com/sites/www.site1.com/files/somefile.png

...on all except the main site of the multisite configuration.

Although img_relocator allows me to just type things like:

<img src="somefile.png" />

... and still have these URLs be automagically generated, they still appear to those users who actually look at the URLs.

Enter mod_rewrite

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

With these sites running over Apache 2.x, mod_rewrite offers a simple way to rewrite the files URLs: in the Apache site definition file for the vhost describing the site, we can use:

At long last, I've moved the OSInet sites from shared hosting to a VDS over the 4-day Xmas period, and overall it went well.

However, with new users (dare I say bots ?) eager to refresh the site after a few hours offline, I soon had to stand about 20 hits/sec, which proved to be a bit too much on this small VDS. So I enlisted the help of APC, just like the drupal.org sysops do, and like I do on the group's intranet servers and it went really faster.

A few months ago, I discovered the Lilypond music typesetting system, and thought I had stumbled upon some sort of holy grail: here was an open source system which, at last, allowed me to write music much like program code, and did not jump me through the hoops of a UI in order to create scores and the MIDI files representing them.

A problem with the yet unreleased versions of Drupal 6 is that in some cases Drupal all of a sudden seems to lose all of its paths. In my case it happened when working on a port of an OSInet module from the Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 6 API.

A symptom of the problem can be seen by checking the menu_router table and finding it to be empty, although it should contain the default site navigation.

2007-08-23: site updated to Newsflash 0.12 : the Helvetica selector is gone, which means some of the content of this post no longer applies.

I've just given this blog a facelist using the Roople NewsFlash theme, and I'm somehow dubitative about it:

• on the plus side
  • the 3 "user" blocks above content and the 3 other ones below content are a neat feature
  • the color balance feels good to me, in either of the 3 predefined colors
  • overall, it works way better than my "nested" theme a few months ago
• on the minus side
  • although I tried various content layouts using the 3 user blocks, I couldn't get anything fit properly in them: it seems these will be specifically useful when a site has snippets of equivalent size to fill in them. This could probably be news (the theme isn't called Newsflash for nothing) or ads
  • on my screen at least, the text appears blurry, especially in Firefox
  • generally speaking, it seems bold font is used too much, with essentially the same character sizes for title, tags, and various links. I think some more gradation in font effects would be welcome
  • the site slogan is incorrectly positioned in MSIE
  • in Opera and Firefox, the site slogan ascenders collides with the site name descenders
  • the logo display code is wrong (relative URLs); I had to tweak it in page.tpl.php to accomodate the site folder structure
  • the logo setting doesn't apply properly