Heine

Often we need to theme blocks by type (for example blue block, red block, green block), regardless of their position (e.g. their region) or the module supplying them (e.g. module & delta).
Phptemplate lets you theme a block using a template file (hereafter mentioned as simply "tpl"), following a defined naming convention. When theming a block, phptemplate will look for the right tpl in the theme directory. The possible names are nicely described in the handbook.

But what if we want to theme few blocks in the same manner and those blocks have nothing in common? They don't reside in the same region, they are not supplied by the same module, and they shouldn't have the same structure as the default block.
The only out-of-the-box solution I'm aware of, is to have a dedicated tpl for each of these blocks, which is a copy of the rest of the special blocks.
This solution however, is out of the question.

So how do you group blocks which have nothing in common, except for the need to theme them all in the same way?

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Packt recently published an expanded and updated edition of Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites. The new title is Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6, it contains 362 pages (with the index) — 100 more pages than there was in the first book — and it is printed in black and white (with screen captures that look like photocopies of photocopies, yet are still legible). The author, David Mercer, would like his book to become the Drupal community's de facto title for learning the technology Read more →

Website owners and managers need a simple way to edit the text within their websites. They need to add headings, make bold text, bulleted lists, and so forth. It’s a fundamental need in Content Management implementations, and perhaps the most used feature of any CMS.

In spite of this, the solutions widely available today are horrible. (more…)

Today I released Beta 2 of the ApacheSolr module, the module responsible for search on Robshouse.net. There are some bugfixes, some performance improvements, and a usability improvement, but most of all there is a new feature. With this release it is possible to sort search results. If you search on this site you will notice a block inviting you to Sort by, and your options are Title, Author, Type and Date. Author doesn’t make much sense on this site since there is only one, but I think the other sorts will be useful to people who want to find things like the first post I wrote here about Drupal.

I’d also like to encourage people who are using the ApacheSolr module to send me links to their search pages and I’ll start compiling a showcase.

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I've finally got a project that uses the workflow module so I've been able to justify putting some time into it. As a result, I've released version 5.x-2.0. This version of workflow works with the 5.x-2.x version of actions, which is the backport of Drupal-6-style actions to Drupal 5.

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Last week, 28 new modules were released. Do you know what they are? You would if you subscribed to the New Modules list I just added to DrupalModules.com!

Staying ahead of the competition means keeping up with the latest and greatest, and that's exactly what this list will help you do. When that awesome new module you always dreamed of finally gets made, you'll be first to know. Subscribe to the RSS feed today, your career may depend on it! ;)

Update: Some people have been asking how this list differs from the module feed on Drupal.org.

The Drupal.org feed includes a lot of "false positives": modules that are nothing more than a description with no published releases. Unfortunately, a significant number of those projects are simply wishful thinking and will never see a real release.

This list is for people who want to know about modules they can download and install today.

On this list, modules only get announced when the project maintainer publishes their first release. This saves you time by weeding out the projects with no code.

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#!/bin/bash
cvs -z6 -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib checkout -r DRUPAL-$2 -d $1 contributions/modules/$1

There are lots of great Drupal productivity / development modules (e.g. drush, devel, coder) which due to their nature as modules need to be installed on each site you work on. If you work on a dizzying number of different Drupal sites, productivity improvements which are not site-specific are the most useful.
NB: this post is geared toward Mac users.

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If you look at the Drupalcon Szeged 2008 website's tracker, you'll see that most announcement posts are attributed to me. This is all too misleading, because in many cases, I am merely channelling information collected and discussed by various organizers to the public website.

This is the first Drupalcon for which the organizers have set up a management website, with the sole purpose to serve the organization team as good as possible, and while it is certainly not perfect, it works well so far. The "Do Drupaltown" website uses the core profile module, the organic groups and casetracker modules, as well as some small helpers like comment upload, upload preview, markdown with smartypants, diff and of course OpenID. Nothing earth-shatteringly special, just trying to work out easy ways to collaborate.

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I didn't post about it, but I released Views 2 alpha 5 a few days ago. If you're using PHP4, you want to use the -dev version, though; there's a couple of critical bugs that are PHP4 specific that have since been fixed. Then again, sometime in the next few days (Monday maybe?) I will release Views 2 beta 1, so you may just want to wait.

Mollom is a web service that blocks website spam. Websites using Mollom send data they want checked to mollom.com, and Mollom replies with either a spam or ham classification. If Mollom is not certain, it will return an unsure classification, typically prompting websites to ask Mollom's CAPTCHA server for an audio or visual CAPTCHA challenge to present to the user. In other words, Mollom uses a classifier with three states: ham, spam and unsure. We explained that in detail on the "How Mollom works" page.

Over at the Mollom blog, Ben wrote a great post about why we believe this is a key difference, and how that allows Mollom to eliminate your moderation queue. A picture is worth more than a thousand words, so check out the plots below and check out Ben's blog post for more details.

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Andy and Selena did a great presentation this weekend at LUGRadio. Andy's posted the video on her site.

http://www.thesethingsmattertome.com/2008/04/video-drupal-vs-wordpress-p...

This blog is now no longer powered by Apache (the feature filled but slightly bloated beast), instead I have decided to give Lighttpd (pronounced Lighty) a whirl.

What convinced me? Ages ago I read an article by Dries Buytaert comparing webserver configurations. It was shocked to see that Lighttpd appeared to be able to serve almost twice as many pages per second as Apache. There is also the advantage that a static file will only cost you substantially less memory to serve in Lighty than it will in Apache due to Apache bundling ALL the mods into every process.

So what is Lighttpd? The inventors describe it perfectly…

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It is not always easy to scale Drupal -- not because Drupal sucks, but simply because scaling the LAMP stack (including Drupal) takes no small amount of skill. You need to buy the right hardware, install load balancers, setup MySQL servers in master-slave mode, setup static file servers, setup web servers, get PHP working with an opcode cacher, tie in a distributed memory object caching system like memcached, integrate with a content delivery network, watch security advisories for every component in your system and configure and tune the hell out of everything.

Either you can do all of the above yourself, or you outsource it to a company that knows how to do this for you. Both are non-trivial and I can count the number of truly qualified companies on one hand. Tag1 Consulting is one of the few Drupal companies that excel at this, in case you're wondering.

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And because of that we need Drupal specific theme sites like http://www.topnotchthemes.com and not generic template sites like Template Monster selling you an oversimplified template that's so simplified it's unusable.

Edit: oScommerce users have already been burned. Beware!

Template Monster that is. Template monster has decided to offer Drupal templates.

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The following is a HOWTO I just submitted to the Drupal.org Handbook

It is now easy to create feeds of embedded third-party videos on Drupal sites using a combination of CCK, Embedded Media Field, FeedAPI, & the FeedAPI Element Mapper modules.  read more »

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When upgrading my 2 existing Drupal theme project for 6.x (Contented7 and Internet Services Theme), I give a try with RTL supporting, too. BTW, I face a critical problem: I am using LTR only and so how can I test if my RTL implementation is correct? Or, is that enough for user? I don't really have idea about this...

It spend me some time to upgrade theme for Drupal 6.x, but I really love the new theme engine, especially when parallel develop with Drupal 5.x. It is more flexible and less complicated for theme developer. Thanks for Drupal 6 :-)

On my RC news blog there are quite a few elements that are used on a regular basis in news posts (eg specifications tables, etc). It's a major pain in the ass recreating these elements again and again, and now that I've got a few other writers on board, it's getting hard to keep everything consistent.

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