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Mike's Blog

2009
Jul
31st

Fresh Handy Drupal Modules - July 2009

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by Mike

Drupal 6 is seeing some great handy modules being released over the last few months. With the sheer amount of projects being created on drupal.org its a job in itself to keep up with whats already out there. We're increasingly finding there's a module for "that" when a project needs something.

2009
Jul
14th

Open Atrium Rolls Out The Stable

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by Mike

The good guys at Development Seed rolled out a rather hotly anticipated product this afternoon known as Open Atrium.

The web based intranet platform including several built in common features such as groups, projects, case tracker, per-user blogging facilities and a rather useless shoutbox facility.

Development Seed have pulled together a lot of strong Drupal components to provide some great functionality in a really quite flexible architecture. On top of the off the shelf modules such as Views and CCK, and some home grown Development Seed releases such is as Spaces and Contexts.

2009
Jun
19th

Drupalicon Winners

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by Mike

The quick reactions of some members of the Drupal community a couple of weeks ago ensured they bagged themselves a little blue Drupalicon of their own in our giveaway.

We're pleased to announce that Jonathan, John, Amye, Amanda, Oliver, and Karoly all sent a winning message via our contact form. The winners spanned the globe, from the UK and France, to Africa, Canada, and the USA.

As mentioned in a previous blog post, an attendee at Drupalcamp UK built a nifty Drupalicon tracking map to see how far they have travelled. We're hoping the winners will add themselves to the map soon!

2009
Jun
16th

Preventing Admin Footer Output in Drupal AJAX Calls

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by Mike

Some administration and debugging modules for Drupal attach their statistics to the end of Drupal rendered pages using PHP's register_shutdown_function function facility. This is great to ensure the output is always available, no matter how badly built the theme being used is.

Examples of modules adding their stats to the footer include the superb Devel package which allows outputting statistics on your database queries (or "Gunk" as its called in the source code), and the Memcache Admin UI module which provides information about the memcache bin usage.

2009
Jun
15th

Drupalcamp Success!

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by Mike

The first Drupalcamp UK was held over the weekend at the BBC Backstage in Manchester. It was a great success with a large number of visitors showing up for both days. Congratulations to Dan Smith for pulling the event together and keeping it going over the weekend.

It was great to put faces to names, and chat with developers from across the country.

2009
Jun
14th

Setting up Multisites in Drupal

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by Mike

I dipped my toe in to the world of presenting at this weekends Drupalcamp, giving a short 30 minute session on how to configure your server environment to work with Drupals Multisite ability.

The slides used in the session are now available on slideshare.net if you'd like to take a closer look at the command line output I demonstrated, or the Apache VirtualHost configuration format.

2009
May
27th

A WYSIWYG Solution for Drupal 6

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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
11th

Drupalcamp Manchester

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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
5th

Whipping Mollom into analysing custom Drupal forms

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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
Apr
29th

Webform Block Module released

Posted in
by Mike

With the re-development of the company website recently, part of our visual re-design commanded the need for a site-wide contact form. Drupal already has a mature form building system in the webform module so it seemed logical to re-use the tools for building the form.

Webform Block module provides a mechanism for rending webform created nodes within a block. As with any Drupal blocks, they are free to be positioned in any of the themes defined block regions - providing a very flexible mechanism for your form layout.

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