Drupal

I run a couple of Drupal sites on 1and1 for historical reasons (3 years free). A while ago, I dutifully upgraded them to Drupal 5.7. And was surprised to find that PHP's register_globals was enabled.

All this time, I've been running with a .htaccess file which explicitly disabled that setting -- if 1and1's Apache was running mod_php only, it turns out. Apparently, such PHP settings in .htaccess files don't do anything if running PHP in CGI mode.

I was profiling one of my favorite large PHP applications today using APD. I kept getting what seemed to be strange results -- it was telling me that bunch of defines statements (30+ of them) were responsible for an inordinately large percentage of the page generation time. On minimal pages it was as much as 37%. Even on the well-known largest of pages, they were still clocking in at a not insignificant 5%.

That just didn't seem possible.

Here's a table which lists all Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5 core compatible modules, indicates whether they have been ported to Drupal 6 or not, and for which of those branches a simpletest directory exists.  (1350 lines)

Or how to get what you want without cutting code...

I have a Drupal 5-based website for use by my extended family and friends to keep up with my own family while we are overseas. Most of them are far from being sophisticated web users, and seem to be having a challenging time remembering how to log into my site. So what I needed was a way to get them onto the site once and then persist their sessions for a period of time.

Arto is on a tear!

He's working on some Top Secret (for the next X minutes, that is) really cool code for Drupal that is blowing those in the know away.

Check his blog soon to catch up on what this coding maniac has created now.

Back in July I wrote about a development meeting I attended with a bunch of really smart guys. One of those guys was Arto Bendiken.

In the past couple of months, he's added at least 4* new cool Drupal modules to the contrib repository, of which I'm aware (there may be more gems to find -- I didn't even look!). In just the past few days, he added an absolutely amazing module called Trace which is developer's and maintainer's dream come true.

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a development meeting in Stuttgart, Germany organized by the folks I work for. It really had the atmosphere of a small DrupalCon or similar FOSS conference -- a lot of intense thinking and discussion, but a lot of fun and really cool stuff at the same time.

Since some of the stuff we worked on is not ready for public consumption (though most will actually be contributed to the open source community eventually), I'll not write about it now.

I implemented a custom module for my employer to do real-time search transactions against a remote web service. Then I started to think about creating another one for a similar transaction against a different remote service. And I knew there would be more to come.

The module is pretty basic on the Drupal side. Present a form, do the lookup on submit, output the results if any followed by another form. All of that boilerplate would be the same between such modules above. Only the form and the output might vary a bit, and the ultimate backend data source would be different.

Based on a suggestion by Robert Douglass that the poll module be removed from core, and the follow up by Gerhad Killesreiter that perhaps the archive and blog modules should likewise be removed, I posted an old idea I had about how to provide better support for important modules and more diverse use of Drupal:

Moving modules out of core often means they fall of the face of the earth and no longer get support and updates. That's not good.

Happy May Day with 2 big announcements from the Drupal community. First, the long-awaited release of Drupal 4.7.0 will make many a web site developer happy. Growth in usage and development has increased exponentially in the past 18 months, and now is the time to join the growing ranks of those who use, implement, customize and develop Drupal. Second, the official kick-off of the Drupal Google Summer of Code program applications.