Drupal Tutorials

The hardest part about using drupal's javascript features is knowing where to begin: they remained an arcane mystery to me until today. After drinking a bit of whiskey, and studying how core was using Drupal.behavior, I learned it couldn't be simpler. If you don't know how to do this, take a moment:

I reviewed 5 WYSIWYG editor modules for drupal 6: FCKEditor, TinyMCE, WYMeditor, jwysiwyg, HTMLBox. The latter three aren't yet mature, so I saved the in depth reviews for the big guys, tinyMCE and FCKeditor. Truth be told, I decided to have low expectations, and rated these modules against the following:

Lets say you're building a drupal website for Bill's Widget Company. You create a custom theme, and a custom module. Now lets also say you are as dumb as me, and decided to name both your theme and module the same thing: bwc. Its a small mistake you'd never make if you thought for a second: "Should my module and theme share the same drupal namespace?" It sounds dangerous, even if you don't know why. Here's why it is dangerous:

If there is one thing I hate more than breath and martial arts (all kinds...), its writing copy within a php array. So for a recent project that required text-heavy forms, and a bunch of emails, I created an element that mimics php template. The usage and theme function are rather simple: (and rather stolen from phptemplate_render().

Today, I was working with drupal 6's AHAH form elements. Initially, I was delighted at how well they worked. That delight turned to confusion once I realized that the form elements I had put in the menu callback of the #ahah['path'] was missing its name attribute. After doing a bit of research in how the poll module handled the formapi voodoo, I created a generalized function to aid in building AHAH callbacks. If there is a better way to do this, I wasn't able to find it. <?php

On the #drupal IRC channel, Excallibur points out that there are no coding standards for CSS. I'd like to propose some straightforward ones.

Note that I am not intentionally omitting indentation within rules, but am having trouble with my code filter.

In our last episode of enabling new modules via update.php, Steve McKenzie pointed me to a better method: module_enable(). A quick test found, however, that it didn't run the install files, and didn't rebuild the module files cache. So after spending 5 minutes in system.module, I found all the missing pieces. The example update function below will install and enable the new module, as well as rebuild all the css, node type, and menu caches.

UPDATE: There's a better way.

I work with 3 other developers, all of whom have their own local sandbox of our site. Since we're constantly adding new modules, I found a simple way to enable a new module via another module's .install file. That way, all we have to do is run update.php when we update our source tree.

Here's a simple example update function:

<?php