DRUPAL-4-6

So DrupalCon Prague is almost over, and I can now share with you the video of my session about the history of the Drupal block system, from drop.org to Drupal 8, just as recorded on wednesday.

The session page is available on https://prague2013.drupal.org/session/blocks-drop.org-drupal-8-and-beyo… where you can also rate it. Please to it over there, or add your comments here: it is very useful for me to see what needs to be adjusted for upcoming presentations. Based on the overall feedback, it seems that:

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 "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:

A few days ago, it was brought to my attention that something had been broken on the PHP-GTK community site during the 5.0 RC2 upgrade. The problem was easily identified as being codefilter.module having been removed during the upgrade and not reinstalled. Of course, not being at my office, I did not have access to the FTP passwords, but just to my admin account, and I did not want to leave the community members in the cold, so I used this small trick.

Zend Studio is a convenient environment to code in PHP, which is why many Drupal developers are using it. But some settings are necessary to ease its use, due to the specific extensions Drupal uses.

Ofttimes, when developing a site, you can be led to create or import a large number of custom nodes, for instance flexinodes, only to have to delete them later on. Doing it by hand in admin/content is inconvenient when the number of nodes is large, and for custom nodes like flexinodes, the exact entries to delete in the various Drupal tables may not be obvious. Time for a workaround.

XML-RPC is a very simple RPC service, but it may not be obvious how to provide it from Drupal. Here's how.

Some sites include a list of terms recently searched for. I've created a patch for Drupal adding this functionality to the current 4.6.x search module.

Taxonomy. That's what sets Drupal apart, and makes it so much more useful than many of its alternatives. But it's unduly intimidating at first: let's peek under the hood to see how to take advantage of it.

You're peacefully coding a hook_load implementation in your latest drupal module, when your admin account suddenly gets "Access denied" errors looking at nodes. Yikes...