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.
The PHP-GTK community site has been running on Drupal 5 betas since its creation one month ago, and I thought it really needed a live chart of statistics to match its glorious Garland dress, and GD would allow it. But how does one go about creating charts within Drupal ?
.The new Garland / Minnelli theme (née Themetastic) from Drupal 5.0 is one of the main visible improvements over 4.7. However, not all sites are ready to make the jump to 5.0 as soon as it's ready, which should be very soon now, so why not use Garland on 4.7 ?
A first sight, it looks like the book.module
in Drupal 5.0 is missing an important function: the ability
to theme the page displaying the list of books, normally
found at www.example.com/book
The recent removal of the quasi-official node_validate_title() function from 4.7 causing various errors with contrib modules, I wondered whether there wouldn't be a way to trap such errors in a way that would be helpful to newbies, instead of the current situation where all they get from their newly haphazard drupal install is a PHP fatal error.
The idea, then, is to register obsolete functions in some form of legacy maintenance module, to generate a useful help page pointing the user to a doc page on drupal explaining why there is an error in his configuration and what he should do. In node_validate_title()'s case, the help is a bit succinct: http://drupal.org/node/22218#node_validate_title.
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.
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.