February 2006 - Development - lists.drupal.org

Multiple strings with same translation may break form functionality
by lodewijk evers 02 Feb '06

02 Feb '06

Today I spent a lot of time tracking why a form did not work and found an issue with translations and a commonly used way of validating forms. In a site with german localization and ecommerce modules I translated a lot of the form submit buttons strings in the checkout process into a generic label "Weiter" (Next in German) and I broke the process. *Why?* Because the "$op" operator is frequently used to check if an action should be performed in a similar way to: <?php switch ($op) { case t('Do something'): ... } ?> And if the translation for 'Do something' just happens to be the same like the translation for another form button in the same series of forms you can guess why it's not working... In my case it was validating an address with the formdata for a shopping cart, and barfed. I don't know if this issue is solved in the forms API for 4.7+ but if it isn't we should look into that. For 4.6 it might be wise to use translations with caution. Regards, Lodewijk Evers Ontwerpwerk multdisciplinary design l.evers(a)ontwerpwerk.nl http://www.ontwerpwerk.nl

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Patch for fixing date support in 4.7b4
by Sammy Spets 02 Feb '06

02 Feb '06

Hi ya'll, Here is my first patch submission of this series. Hope you like it. Problems solved: * Date field data is now returned to the integer state before code reaches the submit stage (changed actually by the validation stage). The change is transparent to modules expecting the integer value to be in $edit. * Dates were creeping backwards by a day each time a form was submitted. This is now fixed. Problem was with expand_date() using the timestamps if user timestamps are enabled. Problem was only evident when using positive timezone offsets. See discussion at the end of this mail for more details. * Date field data is now automatically validated for correctness as a date. I.e whether the silly user entered in 31/Feb/2001. An error message is added with form_set_error(). * Select fields didn't flag errors found in their data. I.e the class attribute of select fields was not set by theme_select. * Date fields didn't display errors as the error cases didn't cascade into the child elements in the form array structures. Lemme know if there is something wrong with this stuff. Discussion ---------- IMO date fields can be classified into two different requirements. First is the kind of date which is the same regardless of your timezone. An example of this is a birthday. Second, the kind of date that changes depending on location such as the submission time of a comment. Dates must to be placed into one of these categories before timezone support is feasible. The first category, dates without timezone, can be displayed by the current date implementation. Unfortunately, the second cannot and must be linked with the time part of the timestamp _at_all_times_. For this reason I proposed a time and datetime time to be placed in core. I'm going to implement the two types and submit a patch. The datetime field will support timezones and the time field will not for the reasons above. As for timezone support overall... there are two snags i ran into while doing some testing. 1) format_date() will break on Windows because it uses gmdate/date. 2) format_date() is broken anyway in the way it calculates the new timestamp. I.e the timestamp must be converted to UTC before adding the timezone to it. Here is an example: say system timezone is +1100 (UNIX timestamp) and user timezone is -0300 timestamp = 2006-02-01 00:00:00 timestamp += timezone // == 2006-01-31 21:00 **wrong** timestamp = 2006-02-01 00:00:00 timestamp -= system_timezone // == 2006-01-31 13:00 timestamp += timezone // == 2006-01-31 10:00 **right!** I haven't fixed this yet as I need more information from developers and decision makers involved with drupal. I have the solution to this in my head. The decision to be made is whether the database stores localtime or UTC. localtime is better because it makes it possible to query the database without doing conversions from UTC. UTC is better because it avoids the common time hurdle with drupal - timezone support sucks. Many of the developers on this list have responded to me with workarounds for various things. Thank you for those. Additionally, i've received something like, "we don't have enough time to put this stuff into drupal before releasing 4.7". The efforts you've all put in has been astounding and by far 4.7 is a major leap forward for drupal. Unfortunately, the celebration of 4.7 is marred for me, and no doubt many others, because fundamental things like date support are still broken since the days of 4.4. How can you even suggest releasing a product out to market that fails to meet the minimum standard of operability and call it a release? Would an OS be released if dates were broken? Even MS won't do that anymore! Drupal is like an OS and the applications are the modules. Don't forget that! <take in a deep breath> All better now. I'm off to add these types to the system. Happy patching! -- Sammy Spets Synerger Pty Ltd http://www.synerger.com/

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RE: [development] wall street journal featuring drupal site!
by Steven Peck 02 Feb '06

02 Feb '06

ironically, my sister in laws site is for her store in Fresno, Ca as well. ;) ________________________________ From: development-bounces(a)drupal.org on behalf of Khalid B Sent: Wed 2/1/2006 6:11 PM To: development(a)drupal.org Subject: Re: [development] wall street journal featuring drupal site! Suzi is thinkinkless http://drupal.org/user/30957 She is active in the community, although more so a few months ago. Here is the site launch http://drupal.org/node/42817 On 2/1/06, ae2005 <kae2005(a)comcast.net> wrote: > check this out!!! > today's wall street journal feature very prominently a drupal site > called > fresno famous. > http://drupal.org/node/47487 > > > anyone know her? suzi arnold

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wall street journal featuring drupal site!
by ae2005 02 Feb '06

02 Feb '06

check this out!!! today's wall street journal feature very prominently a drupal site called fresno famous. http://drupal.org/node/47487 anyone know her? suzi arnold The FresnoFamous folks wouldn't discuss the dollars and cents of the bail-bond ad. But Mr. Gillespie paid just $100 for 10,000 views of his church's banner ad, currently the only one on the Greesnboro site. Based on normal traffic patterns, those views should occur in about two weeks, says Roch Smith Jr., Greensboro101's owner. Mr. Smith, of course, projects that business will grow. But to the extent that it does, competition will be ferocious. Local newspapers of all stripes -- dailies, alternative weeklies and weekly shoppers -- aren't likely to cede these community spaces without a fight. And then there are the "aggregators," companies striving to create a common software platform that can be used in many different locales. Backfence.com5 is a venture capital-funded operation starting out in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. YourHub.com6, owned by the Denver Newspaper Agency, is already active in four states. And then there is the question of what, if anything, the Googles and Yahoos of the world might do. Indeed, Jarah Euston, the 26-year-old former Wall Street bond analyst who founded FresnoFamous two years ago, says that one of her biggest fears is MySpace, the youth-oriented "social networking" site. There is a lot of information about events on MySpace. Ms. Euston frets that it will one day become easily searchable by ZIP Code, and thus compete with the calendar listings currently at the heart of her business. One indication that economies of scale will play their expected crucial role in community journalism is that both Ms. Euston and Mr. Smith are thinking of expanding, Ms. Euston to Modesto, another central California town, and Mr. Smith to Syracuse, N.Y., where he found a simpatico blogger. And both say they would welcome some way for small sites to band together to attract national advertisers while still keeping their independence. So what about the advertisers? Mr. Gillespie says he was drawn to Greensboro101 because he himself is an active blogger. Mr. Ramirez says he was simply trying to help his family-owned business keep up with changing times. (By the way, while most people's stereotype of a typical bail-bond client is not someone reading blog posts, Mr. Ramirez says Web surfers tend to skew young, and the young in turn tend to skew toward getting into trouble.) As for whether the ads have paid off, both men say it is too soon to tell. Community Web sites are clearly one of those economic spaces that are "in play." It's hard not to root for the locally owned little guys, in much the same way that most of us would prefer that local film buffs, not Blockbuster, own the nearby video store. You can find a list of many of community sites at cyberjournalist.net7. I'm inclined to urge people, if they like their local site, to support its advertisers. I'm just a little worried about how some Fresno readers might take that advice. Write to Lee Gomes at lee.gomes(a)wsj.com8 URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113875833236061670.html

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freetagging: let's users select a parent category
by Fabio Varesano 01 Feb '06

01 Feb '06

Hi everybody, I'm currently playing with the new free tagging feature of drupal 4.7 . A feature I would like to have is permits users to select a parent category while adding a free tag. What do you guys think about this? Fabio

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Hello from another developer/Want to add some features
by Sammy Spets 01 Feb '06

01 Feb '06

Hi everyone, My maiden post to the list so please be kind. ;) First of all, congrats to you all for the great product so far. Big kudos for implementing a proper form api as well! Would love to chat to someone that designed/implemented it to get some idea of the design. I'll be happy to draw an image to represent it if I do get that chat. I've been maintaining a couple drupal run sites for two years and am now tasked with updating stuff from 4.4 to 4.7. Following is the list of things i've built into the 4.4 core that i'd like to port into 4.7. As you can imagine, security holes are very hard to close if you don't keep the core pure. Once a feature i'm proposing to implement has been accepted for inclusion in the core, i'll be happy to submit the patches. If these things are in the core already, a pointer towards some examples of it's use in modules would be much appreciated. Any questions about any of the additions i'm happy to answer. * Support for form fields to be rendered as either editable or view only. This has implications when one of the view-only fields is a key field. Additionally, it would be nice to discuss any ideas you've had implementing a system-wide user-based module field permission mechanism. There might be something in place already so forgive me if i've not rtfm. * Support for datetime and time fields. * Disabling changes to usernames and passwords of administrative users by users having administer users permission. Is anyone currently addressing the date field support in drupal? It could do with some localisation features as well, which i'm happy to add in. How does all this grab you lot? Cheers, -- Sammy Spets Synerger Pty Ltd http://www.synerger.com/

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Theme a 4.7 node form?
by Simon Lindsay 01 Feb '06

01 Feb '06

Hi All, I'm developing some modules which define their own node derived types, and I also want to use actions/workflow and the event modules. However, by default, the actions/workflow field is at the bottom, and the event fields are right at the top. I can manually edit the workflow.module & event.module files, change the weights, and move them around, but shouldn't I be able to "theme" the node edit screen, to override the settings? I can theme the portion of the node I defined with no problems using the '#theme' entry in a fieldset, but that theme function doesn't receive the entire $form array/object. Do I have to write a x_form_alter function, or am I just missing something? This should also enable me to override the default event fields to use a popup calendar? TIA Simon

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Front page module - The way it should be.[tm]
by Trae McCombs 01 Feb '06

01 Feb '06

Hey peeps, Since Gerhard was thinking the module isn't maintained, I thought I'd stick a comment here on the list. Currently, when you install the front page module, you have to go and change: admin > settings > "node" to "front_page" if you want your stuff to show up. To us "dorky end users", this is quite confusing. I would suggest that there is something inside the: admin > settings > front_page area that says: [x] Enable this option site wide. Help text: *** Warning, if you enable this, when people visit: your_drupal_site.com they will see what you have put here on this front page form. To change this action back, simply disable this option. --- This would then actually go set node to be front_page -- ... What do you guys(gals) think? Trae PS. See you guys at DrupalCon! You can beat me up (or attempt to) there! -- Trae McCombs || http://occy.net/ Founder - Themes.org // Linux.com CivicSpaceLabs - http://civicspacelabs.org/

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