Drupal Articles

Converting a Drupal Site to Straight HTML

October 18, 2008 - 10:29pm

Web Development:

Drupal:

When Bad Hosts (Yahoo Small Business) Happen to Good Drupal Sites

Time and again, I work for a client who is stuck with a horrid server environment -- say -- Yahoo Small Business.* Surely you must think that a company like Yahoo -- who employs none other than Rasmus Lerdorf -- would offer a decent environment. That's where you'd be wrong.

Its so bad that Drupal 6 won't even allow itself to ATTEMPT an installation. And with good reason. Consider the facts:

Why is "Full HTML" Input Format Dangerous?

October 12, 2008 - 10:10pm

This is a comment I submitted on my localhost site, with full HTML allowed for anonymous users. The fact that "XSS" came up in an alert means I'm vulnerable to attack.

If you want your skin to crawl more, visit the XSS Cheatsheet, which offers a number of techniques for XSS attacks. If you're ever in doubt, no better test than to attempt to hack yourself.

YUI Editor: A Simple, Beautiful, and Easy Drupal WYSIWYG editor

October 12, 2008 - 5:43pm

Tags:

Reviewed Version: yui_editor-6.x-2.0
Depends on: Yahoo YUI

VERDICT: Outstanding! The only lovable Drupal WYSIWYG editor . Painless Installation, Great First Impressions, Easy to configure, image Uploading/insertion works out of the box, editor behavior solid and intuitive, and offers good security features.

In our last review of WYSIWYG editors, a certain editor won because it met my low expectations. Thanks to the tip from Sanjeev, I found an editor so good its off the charts.

Painless Installation, Great First Impressions

The moment after I installed YUI Editor I found this refreshing WYSIWYG smiling at me.

makes you want to write

Drupal.behaviors: The Two Step Secret To Unlocking Drupal's Javascript

October 11, 2008 - 10:33pm

Tags:

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:

Overriding Menu Page Callbacks

October 10, 2008 - 9:10pm

Drupal:

Sometimes you need to override more than a theme function: the entire page needs to be overridden. Drupal 6 makes it rather easy to do this.

In the example below, we call hook_menu_alter(&$callback) to override the display of every single node page view.

Instead of returning a node page, we return "[author's username] is great... for me to poop on.".

 

Loading a Menu, and Theming the Links in Two Lines of Code

October 9, 2008 - 9:38pm

Drupal:

When creating a menu [ admin/build/menu/add ] there's a field for "Menu name". We use that value to load whatever array of menu links we want. In this example, we're using "secondary-links" which comes default on most drupal installs.

Five Drupal 6 WYSIWYG Editors Reviewed

October 7, 2008 - 10:35pm

Tags:

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:

Never name a theme and a module the same thing

October 7, 2008 - 5:37pm

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:

Smashing Magazine Gives a Nod to Drupal

September 24, 2008 - 11:56pm

If I could read only one web design blog in the world, it would be smashing magazine. At one time, (maybe 2004-2005ish), I would have picked A List Apart.

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