March 2006 - Development - lists.drupal.org

hook_install: pgsql: check version number
by Keve 09 Mar '06

09 Mar '06

Hi, I am not very familiar with Postgresql. I wrote taxonomy_access.install file, but for POSTGRESQL priot to 8.0, I need to make a BIT_OR aggregate function. Do you think this will work OK for pg? if (version_compare(pg_version(), '8.0', '<')) { // PRIOR TO POSTGRESQL 8.0: making a BIT_OR aggregate function } Many thanks, Keve.

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nice read: usability tests for Wikipedia online
by Bèr Kessels 09 Mar '06

09 Mar '06

Hello, See http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1845 (http://openusability.org/download.php/89/germanwikipedia_usabilitytest_edit…) The biggest part is (interesting, but) very wikipedia specific. However, chapter 3.4: editing and previewing has some remarkable points: * Hide the "edit" tab when previewing. Apparently that caused a lot of confusion. * Style the preview better. 'Big bold red border" or so. Furthermore it contains a lot of good ideas for when you design/develop your specific Drupal site, tha twill be used by a larger audience. Bèr -- [ Bèr Kessels | Drupal services www.webschuur.com ] Sympal draait nu voor het grootste deel al op 4.7: http://help.sympal.nl/sympal_draait_nu_voor_het_grootste_deel_al_op_4_7

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Forms.module for 4.7
by Boris Mann 09 Mar '06

09 Mar '06

See this? http://www.jotform.com/index My personal idea (i.e. handwaving) for forms.module for 4.7 is that it would provide support functions to be able to build forms on the fly. Both Survey.module and perhaps CCK (e.g. for custom built node/ add forms) would use forms.module for this functionality. Thoughts on this? Anyone feel like pooling resources/funds to get this built? -- Boris Mann Vancouver 778-896-2747 San Francisco 415-367-3595 SKYPE borismann http://www.bryght.com

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Default Theme for Drupal 4.8
by Nick Lewis 08 Mar '06

08 Mar '06

Yesterday morning, Dries informed me of the following plans for 4.8: (quote) 1. A new default theme that is more slick. We're done with Bluemarine. 2. A dashboard module to replace the current main administration page (?q=admin). 3. A reorganization of the administration pages. 4. An install system. I've been storming away at items 1,2 and 3 and didn't even know that there were already plans to put this in the next version. With this news, I'd like to offer my support to any current efforts, and to give an overview of what I've accomplished so far that could be of benefit to item one. I'd put my GPL work on the CVS, but I don't think I've been granted access yet. So, I'll just give a brief overview of where I'm at, and see who comes out of the woodwork (I know... 4.7's bugs... see bottom if you're pissed...). For now, I'll spare y'all and keep it to item one: 1.So I've been working on one theme, Curved_Slate, but a variety of factors (my stupid head, the experiemental nature, and the so far disorganized approach to version tracking have lead it to be bugtacular for the moment.) I'm currently in the process of going backwords, and modularizing it into a a lightweight configuration, which can be easily extened into the heavy weight configuration. If no work has been done thus far on the default theme for 4.8, a lightweight distro (no js, or experiemental scripts, just templates, art and CSS) might provide a good starting point. The theme is has largely solved a number of persistant drupal themeing problems -- namely: 1. all css 2. .main-content expands and contracts smoothly in response to various $layout configurations. 3. all columns grow and shrink perfectly to fit any page height 4. page.tpl.php ordered content, sidebars, footer. 5. min-max width support in both firefox and safari (albeit, by way of an ugly hack): [see: http://nicklewis.smartcampaigns.com/themes/curved_slate/default_styles/layo… ] 6.A page.tpl.php file that nevertheless looks an awful lot like good old box_grey 7. Only two wrapper divs 8. You can easily (especially with some PHP scripting) expand and contract the columns or #main div to fit whatever needs you have. The theme most likely doesn't support IE5 (IE5 -- the great ugly stick of websites...) -- but I don't really care, and my guess is it would be more to drupal's benefit to focus on the 95% of web users who use modern browsers, than to settle for tables and hacks so that grandma on the mac classic can keep up with her persistant reading of online content (though my grandma tells me she's enjoyed reading my blog -- and she uses IE 4!, so it might not be so bad... but grandmas lie sometimes....) And, we could always keep bluemarine around for her. It wouldn't be terribily difficult to setup something to detect browsers that won't support standards, and serve them a crappy-browser-safe theme. Anyways, I'd be happy to throw my efforts this direction, but don't want to step on any toes, so let me know if your working on the same thing. Otherwise, provided I can login to the CVS, I'd be happy to CVS-itize a bare bones version of my theme as a place to start. A sidenote: ---Curvy Corners, a dream that Rico's Apache Liscense prevents--- I know practically nothing about Javascript... but... this is what I've hacked together to generate curved corners. The curved corners script is now a 15 kilobyte dandy (down from Rico's 150kb library). sourcecode: http://nicklewis.smartcampaigns.com/modules/jstoolbox/rico.js However, practical considerations (such as making it dead simple to implement curved corners) have forced me to use a patched Prototype 1.5 beta library source code: http://nicklewis.smartcampaigns.com/modules/jstoolbox/prototype.js While this approach is still buggy, and their are other techniques like sliding doors (when considering how short life actually is, sliding doors looks like less and less of an ideal solution), with those two scripts included, I can generate a curved corner around any part of the site. Take a look at the code that actually creates those corners on my blog: <script type="text/javascript"> var roundCorners = Rico.Corner.round.bind(Rico.Corner); roundCorners('div#main'); roundCorners('div#top-nav', {corners:'bl br'}); roundCorners('div.downloads'); roundCorners('div#compose-options-right'); roundCorners('.sidebar div.block',{border:'#eeeeee'}); roundCorners('div#footer',{border:'#eeeeee'}); </script> I'd argue that the simplicity of the Javascript solution is beautiful (I realize that its lacking in a lot of areas that developers tend to focus on, but for mid-level users, this stuff is golden). Its not something that other CMS's offer, and I think its a subtle feature that could set drupal apart. If anyone has any insight into this it would be very appreciated. That's enough for one night (er... morning for y'all continentals). Onward, Nick Lewis http://nicklewis.smartcampaigns.com Reference: page.tpl.php <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="<?php print $language ?>" xml:lang="<?php print $language ?>"> <head> <title><?php print $head_title ?></title> <?php print $head ?> <?php print $styles ?> </head> <body> <div id="main" class="<?php print $layout; /*THIS CLASS ALLOWS SIDEBARS TO DISAPPEAR SMOOTHLY */ ?>"> <?php if ($site_name) : ?> <div id="site-name"> <h1><a href="<?php print url() ?>" title="Index Page"><?php print($site_name) ?></a></h1> </div> <?php endif;?> <div id="header"> <?php if ($site_slogan) : ?> <span id="site-slogan"> <?php print($site_slogan) ?> </span> <?php endif;?> </div> <div id="primary-menu"> <?php print $primary_links; ?> <br class="clear" /> </div> <div id="columns" class="show-all" > <div class="cols-wrapper"> <div class="float-wrapper"> <div id="content"> <div class="main-content"> <?php if ($mission) { ?> <div id="mission"> <?php print $mission ?> </div> <?php } ?> <?php print $tabs; ?> <?php /*Supress content title if page is the front page */if (!$is_front) { ?> <h1 class="content-title"><?php print $title ?></h1> <?php } ?> <?php print $help ?> <?php if ($messages) { ?> <div id="message"> <?php print $messages ?> </div> <?php } ?> <?php print $content; ?> <?php print $breadcrumb ?> </div> </div> <?php /* remove all columns if $layout variable returns as "nosidebars" (see template.php file) */ if ($layout != "nosidebars") { ?> <?php if ($sidebar_left) { ?> <div id="sidebar-left" class="sidebar"> <?php print $sidebar_left ?> </div> <?php } ?> </div> <?php if ($layout != "left") { ?> <?php if ($sidebar_right) { ?> <div id="sidebar-right" class="sidebar"> <?php print $sidebar_right ?> </div> <?php } ?> <?php } ?> <?php } ?> <div class="clear" id="em"></div> <div id="footer"> <?php print $footer_message ?> <?php print $closure ?> </div> </div> </div> </div> <?php include "$onload_js"; ?> </body> </html> For uppity folk: I'm sorry, but I am swamped with work, and don't have time (or really the programming knowledge) to take on those bugs -- however, all of my "put a roof over your head" work is directly related to these goals of 4.8 -- I figure some contribution is better than no contribution. I'm very interested in having my efforts pay off for drupal as a whole. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

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active record tutorial
by Adrian Rossouw 08 Mar '06

08 Mar '06

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-cb03076/?ca=dgr- lnxw01ActiveRecord The migrations stuff shows why i believe we need to move towards using arrays to create tables. The actual active record stuff is very much possible / probably how the forms api 2.0 will end up working. (ie: define fields as part of the form, where form could be a node form for instance and you just edit and hit save/submit/execute afterwards) -- Adrian Rossouw Drupal developer and Bryght Guy http://drupal.org | http://bryght.com

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How about changing localization to language? Or ...
by Munzir Taha 08 Mar '06

08 Mar '06

Hi, During my translation of druapl, I noticed the use of the word 'localization' in a place where the word 'language' could fit quite perfect (Needless to say the former is harder to translate ;)). I could be wrong in case drupal developers want to expand the locale module in the future to include other localization support like other calendars for example. What do you think about this change, please? -- Munzir Taha Telecommunications and Electronics Engineer Maintainer of Fedora Arabic Translation Project https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-trans-ar Maintainer of the OpenBugs project page at http://www.arabic-fedora.org/munzir/OpenBugs.html Master CIW Designer, ICDL, MOUS, Linux+, LPI 101 Riyadh, SA

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Contributions cvs checkout broken on OS X 10.3
by Rowan Kerr 08 Mar '06

08 Mar '06

contributions/modules/betterupload has a lowercase 'cvs' directory in it, as well as the standard uppercase 'CVS' directory. OS X hates this because it is only case-preserving, not case-sensitive and sees the two directories as being the same. Consequently, it is impossible to checkout the contributions repository at least with the version of cvs that comes with the Mac OS 10.3 development tools. (CVS 1.10). The Error... cvs checkout: in directory contributions/modules/betterupload/cvs: cvs checkout: cannot open CVS/Entries for reading: No such file or directory cvs [checkout aborted]: cannot write <CVS/Template file>: No such file or directory Can anyone fix this? Or do I just have to update to a newer OS... -Rowan

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Re-Thinking Events in Drupal
by Angie Byron 08 Mar '06

08 Mar '06

Hey, folks! At DrupalCon, there was a lot of discussion about where events are in Drupal and how they can be improved. I'd like to setup an IRC chat for us to try and hammer out how we can develop flexible APIs and where additional functionality is needed to make events in Drupal really shine. More details can be found at the following post: http://drupal.org/node/52104 Hope to see you there! -Angie

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OpenID
by Jonathan Daugherty 08 Mar '06

08 Mar '06

Greetings, A few months ago, a co-worker of mine created a Drupal module to support OpenID logins. The module was based on Dan Libby's PHP OpenID library. For anyone wanting to catch up, it was discussed here: http://drupal.org/node/33254 Some other OpenID discussion is here: http://drupal.org/node/23256 I've taken over the development of the module and I've updated the module to use the JanRain PHP OpenID implementation, which is a feature-complete port of our Python library. Our PHP library can be found here: http://www.openidenabled.com/openid/libraries/php Here is a link to the current module source, which is under fairly heavy development: http://www.openidenabled.com/resources/downloads/php-openid/openid.module Since authentication in general is probably a topic of considerable interest to you all, I want to be sure the OpenID module measures up. I've tried to be sure I understand Drupal's authentication internals and the role OpenID can play, but please correct me where appropriate. Here are some notes about the module: - The plugin declares a block hook and provides a one-field OpenID login form that appears in the left navbar. The module is not really an authentication module because it doesn't declare an appropriate authentication hook (username@server syntax won't work for OpenID). Various other callbacks in the module handle the OpenID authentication steps and set $user when appropriate. - If you log in with an OpenID and don't have a local Drupal account, an account is created for you with the appropriate authmap record. However, you'll be prompted for an email address upon successful OpenID authentication *before* the Drupal account is created. (My goal here is to make sure any kind of profile info needed is collected before the OpenID-auth'd user is allowed into Drupal.) - My major concern is how to blend OpenID with existing accounts so users can choose to use OpenID for their accounts. On my drupal installation, I can log in with a username and password or OpenID to access the same account, provided the appropriate authmap record is present (which I created manually). The use case we can think of here is, "I'm already known as johnboy on this Drupal installation, but I want to access the johnboy account with an OpenID now. How can I tell Drupal about that?" I'm thinking that the OpenID module can implement a form to let users configure this, but it will probably involve setting the users.pass field to NULL. What do you think? Do you have any recommendations for how we should go about doing this? What would be consistent for your futuristic vision of Drupal authentication? Any feedback would be much appreciated. Thanks! -- Jonathan Daugherty JanRain, Inc.

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a couple things to discuss about base_path()
by Matt Westgate 07 Mar '06

07 Mar '06

While base_path() does many a good thing, it also presents a couple of obstacles that could use further discussion. - Enabling or disabling clean_urls on a site with content will break hand-rolled links. For example on my staging server clean_urls are disabled but they're enabled in production. If I continue to do that, my links will break. - Moving a Drupal site from one subdirectory to another or from a subdirectory up to a root folder will break links if the site is using clean_urls. How should we solve these problems? A couple of ideas. Let's pick one. 1) Provide a link updater script in the scripts/ folder 2) Add some sort of 'fix my links' button via the admin interface 3) Hook a URL fixing script into the clean_url form toggle so it runs after the setting has changed. 4) Make a link-updater contrib module to point users to. I'm in the camp of #4 since I see this as a rarely used interface option. Oh, and I'm also volunteering my time to write the mod. Matt Westgate | www.lullabot.com

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