By default, the current Eclipse-based PHP IDE (PDT) uses an indenting style based on One True Brace, and the upcoming Zend Neon version happens to be also Eclipse-based. For developers working with OSInet Drupal modules or PHP-GTK code, or anyone wishing to apply the OSInet coding style, or another form of Whitesmiths / Symbian PHP formatting, Eclipse allows for customizing the bracing/commenting style by hand-tuning, o

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

Drupal.org being unavailable quite frequently these days, some may find it hard to download the module of their choice.

Luckily, the downloads are static files served as public downloads outside Drupal itself: all it takes is knowing the proper URL, and they are all gathered on ftp://ftp.drupal.org/pub/drupal/files/projects, just waiting for your favorite FTP browser.

The google_gadget module is now available directly from my sandbox on drupal.org, at http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/contributions/sandbox/fgm/google_gadget/.

It should make it simpler to use than having to gather the pieces from my post explaining the module.

2009-05-24: UPDATE: now ported to D6

Having recently discovered the Google Gadgets API, and being on vacation this week proved too much of a temptation: I had to build one using Drupal. Here is a way to do it, as a module creating a Google Gadget to directly search http://api.drupal.com/ from the iGoogle home page. User preferences allow searching the various versions of the API and default to Drupal 5.

After almost six months without abuse following the installation of the captcha module, a spammer found its way through it, to promote a ringtones site.

Not that it did him/her much good, since comments are premoderated anyway, but still...

Sheer luck, of astute pattern matching and module workaround ? Oh well, it's still six months of peace gained. Well worth the almost nonexistent hassle, it seems.

It's 2007, people ! Rejecting Opera for its lack of standards compliance and advocating MSIE and Netscape Navigator instead is just ... well, you know what.

Can't but wonder whether they heard about the Acid test, or about that small, relatively unknown browser named Firefox.

The "heavy" modules OSInet contributes to Drupal (G2, Helpdesk, Zeitgeist) have now been placed under the new release system.

Branches and releases have been created where applicable:

Just a quick note about Mediawiki today, because I noticed I hadn't been writing about software for quite some time. I just installed Mediawiki 1.7 on a server, and was annoyed by its table of contents (TOC) being in the normal HTML flow under the default "Monobook" skin, unlike Dokuwiki, for which the default skin neatly places the TOC on the top right of the main area. Of course, you can always use per-page directives to define this, like {{TOCright}}, but this is tedious to do on every page. After considering alternative skins, I figured it might not be that much to tweak, and indeed it is quite simple once you know where rules are located. so here we go: