drupal

I'm a huge fan of the Webform module (and building Drupal forms in general), and I just today noticed a feature I hadn't previously taken advantage of. This is the ability to programmatically add what are called "pre-built" option lists that can be used in your webforms.

Here are the slides from my Keynote presentation at the Tennessee Higher Education Information Technology Symposium at Fall Creek Falls on Monday, April 19th 2010. Also, here's the abstract for the presentation:

In a site I was recently working on, I found myself hard-coding links to files stored within my Drupal site's "files" directory. If you've ever coded these links before, you know that they normally look something like:
/sites/[sitename]/files/[someotherdirectory]/image.jpg

This can be somewhat painful to add to the site, especially if you have any plans to ever change the domain name of your site. It would really be ideal if you could leave the domain name out of the equation and just write the link in the format:
/files/[someotherdirectory]/image.jpg

This is actually possible to do using the .htaccess file that appears in the root of your Drupal installation. Basically you just need to add a single line:
RewriteRule ^files/(.*)$ /sites/%{HTTP_HOST}/files/$1 [L]

After you implement this rule, you should be able to start writing simpler links to your "files" directory.

Happy coding!

I was having trouble locating a good Firefox search add-on for searching drupal.org. A Google search or two reveals a couple of add-ons created by community members in the past couple of years that do searches of drupal.org via a Google search (using the "site:drupal.org" keyword). I know, however, that the searches on drupal.org recently received an overhaul (using Apache Solr) and now, searching on the actual drupal.org search is actually more efficient than a Google search in many cases. Especially if you know how to make quick use of the right sidebar of the search page which makes use of faceted search.

I knew it couldn't be that difficult to build a search plugin for Firefox, so I began searching the Mozilla site for instructions on that. If you're interested in doing this on your own, you can find out how to build what's called an "OpenSearch plugin" for Firefox at: Creating OpenSearch plugins for Firefox

If you'd like to download the add-on that I built and begin searching Drupal.org from Firefox, click on the screenshot below:

This video/tutorial was initially started as a presentation for the Denver Open Media Conference this weekend. Since we had a snowstorm on the day of my session, I decided to do this as a screencast here instead. My description of the session and the screencast appear below:

I'm a big fan of using exposed filters in my administrative views that I build. One thing that had escaped me until today was that there isn't always a really easy way for my users to get back to square one. I need a reset button. Don't we all?

I did some searching around and some experimenting. It turns out that you can do this really easily in a custom module just using a hook_form_alter(). You can see the result in the screenshot below. Easy reset button.

I was working today on creating a menu that is role-based. This is for the new Jones International University (http://www.jiu.edu) content management system, which is going to be Drupal-based. I was a little surprised that you can't easily do this when you're creating your individual menu items (say who gets to see what), but it's actually not too hard with a bit of PHP code added into the theme layer (in your page.tpl.php file). The current header is shown in the screenshot below.

So we decided at Jones that we needed to use the Multiselect module that was built for Drupal 5. We had used it in the past, but it looks like its previous maintainers have abandoned it. Too bad because it looks like a lot of people other than us found this sort of CCK widget to be very useful.

I spent the past couple of days working on it and I can finally say that it has been completely overhauled and is now working with the Drupal 6 form api (FAPI) and the latest version of CCK.

So it's interesting creating my first Drupal site for personal use. I've built a lot of sites in Drupal for the Jones Knowledge Integration Group already, but Jill and I decided to set up a new personal blogging site using Drupal. We haven't got a lot of features so far, but we're having fun getting started with it. We know we want blogging at the very least. Probably podcasting as well, but that's not set up quite yet. It's nice to know that you have a public playground available to try new things.