Posts from May 2009

A WYSIWYG Solution for Drupal 6

Making content easy to edit with in a content management system usually involves the inclusion of a drop in JavaScript based Rich Text Editor. There's plenty of them around such as TinyMCE, FCKEditor, YUI Editor, to name but a few. Drupal has support for nearly all editors which are made available, but the level of integration varies greatly amongst the contributed modules.

With the arrival of Drupal 6 the WYSIWYG API module was born, with the task of unifying the configuration and integration of 3rd party JavaScript editors, and making it easy to get them installed on the server.

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DrupalCamp UK Competition Prizes

On the run up to DrupalCamp UK event in June I've been in contact with various book publishers to get some books for prizes. As a result we proudly present the first Sponsors of DrupalCamp UK. Both publishers have been extremely helpful and generous with their offerings of prizes and future discounts.

Drupalcamp Manchester

Next month sees the first Drupalcamp event being held at the BBC New Broadcasting House building on Oxford Road, Manchester. Perfectly located with in walking distance to train, bus, tram networks, as well as drinking establishments at the end of the day.

The weekend event spans the second week of June '09, so should be accessible to enough new and seasoned Drupal users and developers to visit. It's being organised by members of NWDUG - the North West Drupal User Group.

The format of a "camp" is based on a user generated conference — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants.

Drupal quick optimisation; Caching and APC

What sort of performance increase would you expect to see by simply using Alternative PHP Cache (APC) and Drupal caching? APC is an extension that caches the compiled PHP bytecode hence avoiding the overhead of parsing and compiling source code for every single request.

The following benchmarks were performed using ApacheBench with 1000 requests (50 concurrently). The requests were sent to the frontpage of the site, which is quite intensive in terms of modules ( views // panels // custom modules etc)

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Whipping Mollom into analysing custom Drupal forms

Mollom is a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop spam on your blog, social network or community website. The goal is to make moderation easier, you have more time and energy to interact with your community.

The Mollom service definitely reduces the amount of junk form submissions coming through, however the current (v1.7 at the time of writing) Mollom Drupal module isn't very flexible in what forms in your Drupal powered site it will protect.

All the common forms are covered: user registration, user log in, commenting, node creation. However when you want to protect a custom form on your site there's no documented clean way to add support. With a bit of mollom.module tracing and some test hacking this morning I've come up with a solution to add Mollom analysis to you custom forms using a relatively small module.

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