April 2006 - Development - lists.drupal.org

Ajax suggestions for an SoC student
by Steve Dondley 18 Apr '06

18 Apr '06

I know a University of Massachusetts student who is very interested in putting his interest in Ajax to work for the Drupal SoC program. His basic project idea is to use Ajax to lower bandwidth and minimize whoe page generations. For example, the vote.moduel displays a poll in a block and the user makes a selection and clicks on "Vote." It's overkill to make a visit to index.php to regenrate an entire page simply to display the poll results when they could get redisplayed in the block with Ajax. There are probably dozens of other examples like this. So this is not "ajax for ajax sake." It will help reduce server load. I'd like to help find a mentor for the student, someone who knows more about Ajax than I do and who can help him think up concrete ideas for using Ajax with Drupal to minimize server load to put into a proposal. Please email me and I'll put you in touch with him. Thanks! -- Dondley Communications http://www.dondleycommunications.com Communicate or Die: American Labor Unions and the Internet http://www.communicateordie.com

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Stop talking , go testing
by Karoly Negyesi 18 Apr '06

18 Apr '06

Nice amount of mails today. How many hours have _you_ spent today with testing core? Fixing the 20+ page bugs? Upgrading the docs? Talk comes after 4.7 is out.

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bah, nevermind
by Karoly Negyesi 18 Apr '06

18 Apr '06

Feel free to banter about OO crap. There is no better time than now when a release is imminent into which only a year's went into. Of course it's free of bug and it does not need at all any more testing. Or feel free repeat the form UI talk which already happened in January but noone looked up it apparently. Much less coded a line in the last three months. I have set myself to nomail until 4.7 is out so do not bother answering, I will not see it.

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Geo-IP Modifications to 'watchdog' and 'statistics' modules
by Gary (Lists) 18 Apr '06

18 Apr '06

Last night I wrapped up a few changes to my copy of 'watchdog.module' and 'statistics.module' to add a graphic country flag and country, city, latitude and longitude. In case anyone would like to spruce up their 'details' pages, as you see from either the watchdog entries 'details' link or the statistics module's 'details' links, then you might find this useful. (I often would copy an IP from a log entry and then paste it somewhere else to get more data. Now I don't need to do that.) A short post with some images will help explain the small addition, which you can read here <http://accidentaltechie.org/dru/?q=node/38> The changes are: - add 3 utility functions to watchdog module, to curl the hostname IP data; - add a new table row to the watchdog output; - add a new table row to the statistics output The functions are surely not as compact as they could be, and there could be some more specific error checking about the results. (No error is destructive, and 'curlerrno' is reported back when encountered, so it's pretty graceful even with junk.) Although not web-configurable, there is a boolean 'switch' in the functions to include or exclude Latitude and Longitude data. (Commented.) As is, they _do_ include this data. You can download a text file which includes a description and copy-paste code at the above URL. Feel free to experiment (I use the hostip.info HTTP service, but others could be substituted, with modifications to the "split()" functions to break apart the curled result. Anyway, my first "Thanks for your help as I've come along." Have at it. -- Gary

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Generic Authentication Bridging
by Gary (Lists) 18 Apr '06

18 Apr '06

Hello all. It's Saturday morning and I've convinced myself that: a) we're going to fully embracing Drupal, which means a few grumbles ;) b) I really need a way to (easily) bridge user authentication between Drupal `userid` and several other SQL db's user entries c) and so I'd like to begin writing my first Drupal shareable code d) our 2-week tests with running pMachine inside Drupal are a success I am a generally confident PHP programmer, but I must admit that I am only at about 50% confidence with my knowledge of Drupal's APIs. Therefore, I'd like to start on this [ (b) ] basic code project in order that I might solve an immediate need as well as become more confident with those API's, as they exist in 4.7. If there are others who find that they might need a similar piece of code (see more full description below), then I would very much like to start a collaboration with you. ================================================================= Project: Generic User Authentication Look-up Bridge Framework Project Description: I wish to create a basic, super-admin-only set of PHP functions to bridge the Drupal user's table to (any) other SQL table. The Drupal `userid` will be looked up in any of the named DB's and will considered valid if both `userid` and `password` are the same in both places. Functionality would be modular, allowing the addition of application-specific bridges for common OSS user-based tools (i.e., pMachine, Olate Download, etc.) Project Hopes: 1) Simple, flexible design. 2) Drop-In Install, Single-Page Management. 3) Eventual addition of 'Authenticate and Migrate User' functionality. ================================================================= Please contact me via email if this is something that you have an interest in working on. (Please, hold off on the "I'd like this too, but I have no way to help" emails until a bit later, okay? ;) I am open to the possibility that I'm a dreamer and that I this dog won't hunt. Please gently discourage, as appropriate. -- Gary

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Build or Buy?
by Khalid B 18 Apr '06

18 Apr '06

> Anyway, there are some __very under-represented__ tools called 'pat', or PHP > Application Tools. They are open-source and they are brilliant. > > <http://www.php-tools.net/site.php> > > Drupal should really consider using parts of this system. It provides all > kinds of rock-solid code, professional development of code, and a > lightning-fast PHP templating system, complete with cacheable templates. > > I think others might want to check these tools out. They are not "beginner" > really, but they are still not hard to use. (I would say Beginner Plus is > about all that's needed...and some idea of PHP classes and objects.) > > I still rely on 'pat' to do very much of the work at a number of sites, and > I will continue to use 'pat' even with Drupal. I've been using 'pat' for > about 2 years now, and I find a number of the modules to be stunning in > their quality and clarity. > > patForms, patNewsletter, patRSS, patTemplate, and more. Hi Gary I would like to comment on your post above in another topic. This is the usual "build" or "buy" debate. Years ago when I started with Drupal, I was wondering like you why we do not use other tools that exist out there. I saw a lot of the resistance to integrate stuff from other projects as the NIH mentality (Not Invented Here), and reinventing the wheel. Over time, I started to see that what makes Drupal unique is that we put in it stuff that we a) build to fit the need, and b) control ourselves. One bad case where we relied on a third part component (xmlrpc library), that was unmaintained, caused us severe headaches with security at one point. We rewrote it from scratch to get over this. Another point is the javascript stuff in core. There are libraries out there (Scriptalicious/Prototype), but they are BIG. Steven Wittens wrote a set of minimal AJAX javascript libraries that is today in core. Jeff Robins took the S/P libraries and wrote a contributed module around it. Core is about being lean, and unbloated. It is about providing powerful yet simple APIs for everyine to use with the least code possible. As long as the license is GPL, feel free to write a contributed module around anything that already exists out there. It is all about choice: those who want lean will stick with core, those who do not mind the bloat and want the functionality will pick the contrib part. If something really stands out in contrib, it becomes a candidate for core with a little "marketing" and persuasion, but it has to be really outstanding to be included. Just my $0.02

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I'm back
by Dries Buytaert 18 Apr '06

18 Apr '06

Hello, I'm back from honeymoon and subscribed to the development mailing list. Spent the last couple days catching up with personal e-mail, scheduled some Drupal related Skype calls, accepted a number of speaking gigs, and am reading parts (but not all) of the mailing list archives. So, let's rock and roll! PS: thanks for all the congratulations and presents. Much appreciated. -- Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/

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New theming engine for Rails
by Chris Messina 18 Apr '06

18 Apr '06

Powering the Shopify.com Rails app: http://home.leetsoft.com/liquid/ Might be worth a look... I certainly like the design requirements: * It has to have beautiful and simple markup. Template engines which don't produce good looking markup are no fun to use. * It needs to be non evaling and secure. Liquid templates are made so that users can edit them. You don't want to run code on your server which your users wrote. * It has to be stateless. Compile and render steps have to be separate so that the expensive parsing and compiling can be done once and later on you can just render it passing in a hash with local variables and objects. * It needs to be able to style emails as well as html. Chris

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Re: [development] Organic Group Enhancements
by Bertrand Mansion 18 Apr '06

18 Apr '06

Angie Byron wrote: >I've created a forum post here: http://drupal.org/node/59082 which outlines a >set of Organic Group enhancements CivicSpace Labs is starting for Raven Books of >BuyBlue.org. > >Since it's a long post and I know you all are busy people, I'll sum it up for >you. ;) > >- Allow "tiered" levels of organic groups with different permissions assigned to >members of each type >- Allow organic groups to each get their own set of taxonomy terms to play >around with >- Add the ability to upload a custom logo to group home pages (rather than >switch the whole theme) >- Add an additional option for block visibility to show within groups >- Group-based calendars >- The ability to search for groups in the same state > >I'm sort of "cross-posting" this here because in addition to community feedback, >I would really love to get feedback from developers about the initial >assessments of approaches we've chosen, and whether or not there are more >efficient ways to accomplish some of these. So I appreciate any help/guidance >anyone can give. Hi, I am going to have to work on this as well for my project. I am especially interested in the permission part. Do you already have code to show or are you still in the planning stage ? Maybe we can coordinate our efforts. I need to have this finished before mid-May. Talk to you soon, -- Bertrand Mansion http://www.mamasam.com - creative internet solutions http://golgote.freeflux.net - blog

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Re: development Digest, Vol 40, Issue 34
by David K Norman 18 Apr '06

18 Apr '06

development-request(a)drupal.org wrote: > Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2006 16:19:52 +0200 > From: Morten Wulff <wulff(a)ratatosk.net> > Subject: [development] cvs non-branch tags > To: development(a)drupal.org > > Is it possible to add non-branch tags to modules in the /contributions? > > I'm about to make a major update of banner.module and I would like to > mark the latest "known good" version. > > When I try to tag using TortoiseCVS, I get the following errors: > > --begin-- > In D:\projekter\drupal\drupal-HEAD\modules\banner: "C:\Program > Files\TortoiseCVS\cvs.exe" "-q" "--lf" "tag" "-c" > "pre-node-conversion-20060417" "." > CVSROOT=:pserver:wulff@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib > > Invalid tag for /contributions/modules/banner. > > cvs tag: Pre-tag check failed > > Invalid tag for /contributions/modules/banner/contributed/theme. > > cvs tag: Pre-tag check failed > > Invalid tag for /contributions/modules/banner/po. > > cvs tag: Pre-tag check failed > cvs [tag aborted]: correct the above errors first! > --end-- AFAIK, we only have permission to use the standard releases (DRUPAL-4-7, DRUPAL-4-6, etc.) as tags.

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