Drupal Articles

For all those modules that are in a class of their own...

Update: Check out Boris Mann's ideas on the subject. They are better thought out than the ones I shared in this post.

While studying the mystic ways of jquery, I noticed something: Jquery has granted some plugins an "offical" status. Its easy to inference that these official plugins exist because:

Drupal is Part of the Problem

Should Drupal move to PHP 5?

In one word: absolutely.

In one sentence: if we don't, the drupal project will die along with PHP.

My friends, PHP is dying. Every day, the best programmers are moving to, faster, better constructed, more powerful languages such as python and ruby. The developers of PHP have been aware of this for some time. That's why they released PHP 5*. 

Let Template.php Eat Static

 My arch-nemisis is overly complex logic in template.php and page.tpl.php files. It seems to me that when a drupal codebase becomes brittle and unmaintainable, the culprit is usually going to be hundreds of conditional lines of php code in a template file. You've probably seen code like this before:

THEMES/SPAGETTI_MONSTER/TEMPLATE.PHP

Drupal Wonders: "Where's the Love?"

How much money have you made from Drupal? Now that we have a drupal association, its a question I want you to consider when you make your first donation. Drupal has shown you a lot of love over the years. I hope you can show some love back.

You really have no excuse.

Going Global in Drupal: Too good to be true?

There is a timeless law that every serious blogger needs to remember. As this law doesn't seem to have a name yet, I'm naming it Gillmor's law , after Dan Gillmor. Roughly stated, the law is:

"Your readers know more than you do."

I've discovered a solution to a common drupal programing problem: how to avoid excessively running something along the lines of "$node = node_load(arg(1));" in hooks or functions that don't have node data available to them.

The solution was so easy, and had so many different uses in different contexts that I'm nervous, and know that I must have done something idiotic. Thats where you, my dear reader, come in[1].

CCK is Dangerously Sexy in Drupal 5.0

CCK no longer neuters nodes.  To clear the record, CCK is drupal's most kick ass contributed module, and I recommend it in just about any situation and enviroment.

My reasoning for this 180 degree reversal in opinion are firstly two new modules included in cck:

content_copy.module -- this module allows you to import/export CCK node types from installation to installation. Using drupal_macro() (found in the devel.module), or drupal_execute(), one could theoretically automate these imports in .install file. I know its possible, but I haven'yet completely worked out some details... (namely, that CCK node tables don't appear to exist at the moment drupal_execute, or macro is executed). maybe I'm just an idiot... I don't know....

Drupal Considered Dangerous for Startups?

"Of all the monsters that fill the nightmares of our folklore, none terrify more than werewolves, because they transform unexpectedly from the familiar into horrors. For these, one seeks bullets of silver that can magically lay them to rest.

Try Explaining This to an MBA

I can't even tell you how happy I am to see the brief wordpress-and-garland contraversy resolve in the way it did. This isn't because I saw them porting 5.0's theme as a threat per se --- but rather because it once again demonstrated why open source's way of doing things is going to kick "the Microsoft-Apple-Adobe everything is mine-mine-mine, and I'll bite you if you try to steal it" 's ass.

Simplicity Complex

Over the past few days, I've observed an isolated thunderstorm in my RSS reader. The first hints began when Don Norman blogged "Simplicity is Highly Overrated". Norman writes:

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