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May 2009

2009
May
27th

A WYSIWYG Solution for Drupal 6

Posted in
by Mike

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.

2009
May
20th

DrupalCamp UK Competition Prizes

Posted in
by Chris

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.

2009
May
11th

Drupalcamp Manchester

Posted in
by Mike

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.

2009
May
6th

Drupal quick optimisation; Caching and APC

Posted in
by Chris

What sort of performance increase would you expect to see by simply using Alternative PHP Cache (APC) and Drupal caching? APC is an extension which caches the compiled PHP code whereas drupal itself caches dynamic pages in the database (for anonymous users only).

The following benchmarks were done using ApacheBench and 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 - 259 queries to be exact)

2009
May
5th

Whipping Mollom into analysing custom Drupal forms

Posted in
by Mike

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.

2009
May
4th

The iPhone - The holy grail of push email?

Posted in
by Chris

After having used push email on devices for several years now across multiple devices (Windows Mobile 6 + Symbian 60) I can safely say email on the iPhone is, in my opinion, the best so far! Even comparing the iPhone to the newly released Blackberry Storm, the iPhone still works out cheaper as it works out of the box with Exchange 2003 & 2007 and no expensive additions are needed like Blackberry enterprise server.