Blog for one reason

i did use twitter earlier, but now i created a fresh account, for a bit of experimenting to see if it will be useful at all to me. you can follow me on twitter.com/drupkin

aaand soon the site will get a new server beneath it, just registered on slicehost. i hope the downtimes will be solved by this, and finally i can get my @szofi.net email address too (right now thats not possible thanks to the firewalls). i will write more about my experience with this hosting provider, because i was looking for a good while until i settled. maybe it’ll help others.

Yeehaaw! It started off as a problem we discovered at Nunet with the Drupal XML-RPC server (having html tags inserted into the XML-RPC error messages). I wrote up the patch, and today it got into Drupal 6 and 7!

I have seen too many times that when people install drupal locally, they have no clue about how to set up local URL aliases, so here is my solution, resulting in urls like http://d/5/profile (drupal 5 installation for some profile related project).

The first step is to set up a clean, structured environment for our installations, preferably in our home directory.

File system setup

My structure looks as the following: I created a separate “projects” directory, under which i put the “drupal” directory.

Working on many sites, many projects causes the problem that I need to maintain, install, practically start new drupal installations very often. For example when I am developing a new contrib module I use a clean new installation (I call it "dev space") so no other experimental code interferes with my current work. Such a space usually has the same basic modules and outline: I always install devel module, use the same username/pw, set some user permissions so i can switch users back and forth, install admin_menu, add the php block etc.

I was working on an XML tester module for a colleague of mine when I discovered a small XML server bug in Drupal (namely this issue: http://drupal.org/node/231132). The problem in question was that in core we use t() function to print the error messages into the returned XML, thus enabling localized errors. This would be cool, but until now the error messages had a placeholder in them, to print the variables. Using the '%' placeholder, all the variables got a tag around them, and so the parsing failed when reading the returned XML.

Todays module is the Compact Forms module. What it does is it puts the description for the form element into the textfield, which disappears when users click on it. Very handy, there was such a code snippet on the handbook pages, but this module gives a more general solution for any textfield.

Some expected it to happen, some not. But it did. I left my university, unwillingly though not very upset about it. Planning to settle down for a year or two in Scotland. I started to look up business opportunities here, and will apply for an IT MSc next year, because uni is still a cool thing.

I got a bit fed up with manually downloading HEAD all over again so i threw together a simple BASH script to do the installation for me. It still needs some polishing, but basically already usable.

Usage:
./fetch_drupal_head -d [designation] -p [defaults to ~/projects/drupalm, optional]

the basic search on drupal.org is pretty generic, when one looks for specific information its better to use keywords (thanks for the tip to add1sun). Say you are looking for a project doing paging:

type paging type:project_project into the search box and the search will be filtered to project pages.

Couple days ago I woke up with an obsession. An obsession to won something. And not just any object without particular reason. Though I don't remember I have ever tried one of these piece of furnitures, as soon I read the word "beanbag" i knew this was it. They make nice chairs out of them, with volume of app 1 m^3.