Today I uploaded a new package for the devel distro. It contains the fresh and warm drupal-6.13 core. The most important change is that now command line tests will function without replacing the simpletest module as I packaged the 2.x-dev module along. I tried to have it enabled on install, but the installer overwrites the settings.php, so I can not prefill it with variables.

Recently I wanted to make sure that all images and other files from our server are downloaded to our development environment. This is a short note on how to do this effectively.

Naturally re-downloading all of the files is long, a waste of bandwidth and so on, so I decided to use rsync, a smart tool that can actually look for changed, or new files and only download those. In addition, it is smart enough to learn about files to exclude, which is really useful when someone is using imagecache for instance.

Just a release note for those who are using the devel distro: there is a version bump for core and a few contrib modules.

Recently I had to explain the how Drupal handles table theming, so I decided i’ll try writing it down for others to benefit. Hope its any good. First I’ll write a bit about the idea behind the whole process, and at the end I’ll show this on a concrete example. Comments are welcome.

Data and representation

Drupal lives according to the philosophy that data structure (your raw data, for instance your columns of numbers from a table) and the representation (the actual HTML code that is being printed) are distinct.

Due to some email mishap on my server the contact form has not worked thus far. Up until now, this problem has been fixed.

Due to Roc Zlender’s tireless work simpletest now can be installed without the simpletest framework. This means that automatic installation of simpletest from an install profile is now doable, and so i have included it into the developer install profile.

On top of that I rolled a 6.6 version of the core along with the updated modules. Downloadables as usual in the distro page above. Enjoy!

I am noticing an increasing number of ‘weird’ spam comments on one of my posts. Due to the fact that they are worded almost perfectly makes it impossible to catch with a filter like mollom. Look at this for example:

Impressing statistic from Drupal but I think this is a very rapid “market” and this statistic is even after a day old. Regards, Erik

or this one:

Drupal chart would be more interesting if we can compare it with other big blogs. With only numbers I cannot say great or not.

This is just a short notice that the packaged version of core + contrib modules + installprofile for the developer’s distribution (local project page) has been updated to Drupal 5.10. I am working on a more automated process of doing all this, until then the Drupal 6 version is probably going to get stalled (also because i cant seem to pre-package the simpletest library due to hook firing order…).

Please hit the comments below if you have any suggestion how this could be more useful to You.

with the con over i sat down to tend to this blog a bit, security updates have been done, removed some stupid spam too.. i still feel extremely exhausted after the 4 days of the conference, i don’t know how dries can feel charged after this extreme amount of interaction, learning, partying, but i envy it.

overall the conference was an enriching experience, learned a great deal on drupal 7, special thanks for kkaefer for his talk on javascript and eric, the lady from palantir whose name i forgot and the guy from raincity whose name i also forgot.

For one of our upcoming extensions on emito.net we are introducing a very simple image browser. The idea is that images are attached to a node via file upload and we give the user a very simple interface to browse through them, without leaving the page, loading slow thickboxes etc.

The user is presented with one larger image, and many thumbnails to chose from.

Our solution is very simple, can be handled with theming + a tiny script.