December 2008 - Development - lists.drupal.org

Database creation on Install
by Amy Stephen 09 Jan '09

09 Jan '09

I apologize if this is not the appropriate place to ask this question but I am curious after checking out your fine development work. Why doesn't the Drupal Installation process try to create the database if it doesn't exist already? WordPress is the same. Joomla! will use the database if it exists - and create it, provided the ID has sufficient permissions. It's just another "make things easier" step (for both the "newbie" crowd, but also developers testing/working). I was curious if there were security concerns? Or, if it just never seemed to be someone's itch? Again, if I am out of place with this question, please let me know, and forgive my ignorance. Kind regards, Amy :)

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A streamlined way to develop core patches
by David Timothy Strauss 07 Jan '09

07 Jan '09

I've made a post on the Four Kitchens blog about a new repository we're hosting to support streamlined core development. The post is here: http://www.fourkitchens.com/blog/2008/12/07/using-bazaar-work-drupal-core-p… And here it is in plain text: As anyone who's developed core patches knows, it's not the writing of initial patch that takes the work, it's the combination of revising the patch and keeping up to date with HEAD. With Drupal.org's CVS, this is difficult because you cannot commit your core changes to checkpoint your work. CVS's merge algorithms are also relatively poor for maintaining large divergence from CVS HEAD. One option -- which several community members used to create the huge DB-TNG patch -- was to create a Subversion repository. This is far too much overhead for smaller core patches, and it still required person-by-person approval to commit to the Subversion repository. Four Kitchens is now hosting a much more flexible system for users of Bazaar. Every hour, we synchronize core changes from CVS HEAD into our Drupal 7 branch, which is available for anonymous branching by anyone. Simply download and install Bazaar, which has packages or installers for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and BSD. We're using a repository format that should work with Bazaar 1.0 and newer, at a minimum. Then, where you're ready to develop, run this: bzr branch bzr://vcs.fourkitchens.com/drupal/7 [optional-working-copy-directory] You'll have a fresh working copy with a number of benefits over a CVS checkout: You can commit to your local branch to checkpoint your work: bzr commit You can integrate in changes to HEAD using Bazaar's superior merge algorithms: bzr merge You can branch from your own branch: bzr branch [existing] [new] If you're working with others and they have Bazaar branches, too, you can merge from their branches to collaborate. And when you're ready to post a patch, run bzr diff --old bzr://vcs.fourkitchens.com/drupal/7 to create a patch reflecting all of your changes relative to CVS HEAD. It will be a while before Drupal.org moves to anything other than CVS. Until then, we can foster decentralized development quite effectively using something like the Four Kitchens repository.

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Scalable Internal Activity Stream Module
by Josh Koenig 02 Jan '09

02 Jan '09

Greetings Drupalistas, I'm working on what feels like the hundredth (but is really the 4th or 5th) project that includes some variety of Facebook-like "Activity Stream" for a Drupal-based community. Having tackled this problem in a number of different ways in the past couple years -- none of which I've really ever loved -- I'm tempted to launch a new module project to solve this thing once and for all. My primary concerns are modularity -- such that anything can potentially be an Activity -- and scalability to work with 100s of 1000s of actions and users. After some initial review, I found both this existing module: http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/contributions/modules/activitystream/ However, this seems like a different concept since A) it's focused on external sources and B) it's based on turning each activity into a node. Basically, it seems better suited for an individual site aggregating internet-wide activity than a community reporting on itself. On the upside, this module (and many others, e.g. userpoints) show a nice way to handle things modularly. I'm not too worried about that, really. But I am worried about scaling, and the architecture of activitystream got me thinking about whether or not the activity-as- node architecture was workable or not. I'd love opinions here. IN FAVOR: Nodes are functional. Facebook already lets you comment on every little thing that goes on. This is fun! It would be good for this module to do that too. It also makes future integration with notification/messaging updates possible, as well as every other wonderful thing nodes can do. AGAINST: This will mean huge amounts of nodes, bloating the table. It also means more overhead when logging activity (node_save vs a single optimized db_query). I'm also skeptical that the core node table structure has the right stuff to be queried with maximum efficiency (e.g. nothing to group similar queries by unless I make a ton of node types, etc). There's also the question of unwanted node functions. We don't really want anyone to edit activities. We also don't want them to start showing up in search queries. I could see a possible solution in maintaining an optimized index table for queries, as well as nodes for functionality, individual page views, etc. The bloat problem could conceivably be solved by giving activity nodes (and index entries) a maximum TTL ala watchdog and other big tables. I've already got a table/query design down for indexing that seems to scale very well to 200k activity entries grouped over 20 types and 5000 users. I suppose the next step is to do some testing around what the overall effects are of having short-lived nodes, and whether or not the other edge cases can be solved. I'm wondering if anyone has done any of their own thinking along these lines and has any comments to add. Happy New Year! -josh ------------------------------------------ Josh Koenig, Partner, CTO http://www.chapterthree.com AOL IM: chap3josh 1-888-496-3238

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Some questions about "best practices" for a module in development...
by Jens Reinemuth 30 Dec '08

30 Dec '08

Hi @all, i'm currently porting a module which was originally written as a stand-alone-app to drupal 6.x The main purpose of this module is to provide a kind of management suite to confederations, "vereine" or even political parties. So one of the key-features is a "member-management" that is able to group all members into their "role" in the hole thing. If you found a "verein" in germany it consitsts typically of 5 "board members": - "chairman" - "co-chairman" - "speaker" - "bursar" - "secretary general" To garantee absolut data-security, only "secretary general" and "bursar" should be able to view the whole data of each member, bursar even their finacial data for cash things. But the bursar should then only be able to edit those financial infos while the "secretary general" should be able to change the rest... All others should only be able to see the name of the member (and some anonymous stats) and send them mails or messages via the drupal system. In the standalone app i realized that by using db-views an a simple rights-table that mapped those views (name_show = true / name_edit = false / address_show = false)... Because of this kind of "tree-rights-management" this does not seem to be mapped via roles to a drupal system, right? Im looking for the best solution to this problem so i don't have to reinvent the wheel ;-) Please remember that data-security has absolute priority. Therefor i have some more questions: - Is it possible to access "encrypted" tables via drupal-modules (mySQL, external DB, DB-File encrypted??) It should never be possible to get access to the data from outside the drupal-page! - I would like to verify the addressdata via a DB-Table containing all cites and their postal-code in germany (i MUST NOT query Google or somthing with anonymous member data). The Table is too large (~10MB) to paste its content in the *.install file. How do i import such a great SQL-Statement at install step? Via "system" or "exec" ? - To guarantee the data-security it should be possible, that only the according group (?? you know there may be "Country" - "Department" - "City") should have the data of this member. All Groups above will only get the count of members and a "checksum" so this one can't be part in more than one group. (checksum consists of md5(birthday, name, given name and gender) which should not change very often). Lots of problems ;-) Regards, Jens

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Theme lose HTML formatting after being changed
by rsw-ml＠silverarc.biz 30 Dec '08

30 Dec '08

hello, I have been experiencing a very strange problem here. I am using Drupal6.8 Whenever I try to change even the text-color( the tiniest example) in my existing theme... The HTML formatting suddenly disappears!! I have no clue as to what is happening here..I am very new to Drupal Hope to receive a reply asap Thanks :) Radhika

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Clean urls openSUSE 11.0 Drupal 6.8
by rsw-ml＠silverarc.biz 27 Dec '08

27 Dec '08

Hello all, I have been trying to solve this issue since long, and now I badly need your help. My clean url's just dont seem to get enabled, on the Administer page for Clean URL's, it says this: Your system configuration does not currently support this feature. The handbook page on Clean URLs has additional troubleshooting information. And to change my system configurations for apache, I have done all this: 1. I have checked under phpinfo() that my mod_rewrite module is enabled. It sure is enabled. 2. My .htacces file looks like this: RewriteEngine on RewriteBase drupal6 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA] 3. I have also made changes in default-server.conf file, to AllowOverride All under the script for the root document. It looks like this: DocumentRoot "/srv/www/htdocs" # # Configure the DocumentRoot # <Directory "/srv/www/htdocs"> # Possible values for the Options directive are "None", "All", # or any combination of: # Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews # # Note that "MultiViews" must be named *explicitly* --- "Options All" # doesn't give it to you. # # The Options directive is both complicated and important. Please see # http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.2/mod/core.html#options # for more information. Options None # AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files. # It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords: # Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit AllowOverride All # Controls who can get stuff from this server. Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> I would like to mention here that I have created an alias for drupal6 that resides under my public_html folder. The reason for this is that: My themes were not working properly until i created an alias. i really dont know the exact reason for the same - would be great if anyone would throw some light on it. Actually, I just had a feeling that may be site is not liking the '~' sign in the path and hence is not redirecting properly. So it was just a try and to my pleasant surprise the alias option did work for me! Alias /drupal6 "/home/radhikaw/public_html/drupal6" <Directory "/home/radhikaw/public_html/drupal6"> Options Indexes MultiViews AllowOverride None Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> When I tried to AllowOverride All in the alias script, it said Access forbidden!! So, I changed it back to None in the Alias script. Anyways, but the whole issue is that I am not able to enable clean urls.... Hope to get some help soon! Thanks in advance!! Radhika

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Feed Aggregator xml Errors!
by rsw-ml＠silverarc.biz 26 Dec '08

26 Dec '08

Hello, I have been experiencing some problems with Feed aggregator in Drupal 6.8 When I run cron manually, it shows me the following errors: The feed from National Geographic seems to be broken, because of error "Invalid document end" on line 15.The feed from National Geographic seems to be broken, because of error "200 feed not parseable". I am using openSUSE 11.0 can anyone help?!?! Thanks, Radhika

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AHAH documentation and a patch to Poll module
by Katherine Bailey 25 Dec '08

25 Dec '08

Hi All, I know many people have been frustrated by the lack of proper documentation on the correct way to do ahah forms, in particular writing an ahah callback, and am pleased to announce that there are now two handbook pages on the subject on drupal.org. Please see http://drupal.org/node/348475 for an introduction to ahah in Drupal, and its subpage, http://drupal.org/node/331941, for specific documentation on writing an ahah callback. Also, a significant patch to poll.module was recently committed which makes it adhere to Form API best practices. See http://drupal.org/node/331708. This reinstates poll.module as the best place to go to learn Drupal AHAH forms by example :-) regards, Katherine

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Using array_merge_recursive() in _system_theme_data()
by Steve Edwards 25 Dec '08

25 Dec '08

While working with a couple jQuery files in a recent D6 project by adding a second script to the theme.info file, I came across the issue where when a script is added in theme.info, it wipes out the default reference to script.js, so you also have to add script.js in theme.info so it is available. I was discussing this with Crell in #drupal, and it was suggested to me that I write a patch to fix this. So I figured I'd take a shot at my first core patch and tackle it. After spending a few hours going through _system_theme_data() and drupal_parse_info_file() with my handy dandy Komodo debugger, I've finally figured out the problem. It lies in this line in _system_theme_data(): $themes[$key]->info = drupal_parse_info_file($theme->filename) + $defaults; In particular, it's how the array returned from drupal_parse_info_file() is merged with $defaults. Because it's using the + operator, any duplicate keys are not overwritten (as specified at http://de3.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.array.php) Let me illustrate by showing the two arrays that are to be merged (this was created by adding scripts[] = script2.js to pushbutton.info). //array returned from drupal_parse_info_file() $info = array( 'name' => 'Pushbutton', 'description' => 'Tabled, multi-column theme in blue and orange tones', 'version' => '7.x-dev', 'core' => '7.x', 'engine' => 'phptemplate', 'project' => 'drupal', 'datestamp' => '1230077295', 'scripts' => array('script2.js'), ); //defaults as defined in system_theme_default() $defaults = array( 'regions' => array( 'left' => 'Left sidebar', 'right' => 'Right sidebar', 'content' => 'Content', 'header' => 'Header', 'footer' => 'Footer', ), 'description' => '', 'features' => array( 'comment_user_picture', 'favicon', 'mission', 'logo', 'name', 'node_user_picture', 'search', 'slogan', 'main_menu', 'secondary_menu', ), 'stylesheets' => array( 'all' => array('style.css') ), 'scripts' => array('script.js'), 'screenshot' => 'screenshot.png', 'php' => DRUPAL_MINIMUM_PHP, ); The problem is that both have a [scripts] key, so since duplicates aren't overwritten, only one script array remains. Which one remains depends on the order of the arrays in the statement (i.e. drupal_parse_info_file($theme->filename) + $defaults vs. $defaults + drupal_parse_info_file($theme->filename)). The way to fix this as best I could tell is to simply use array_merge_recursive() to merge the arrays: $themes[$key]->info = array_merge_recursive(drupal_parse_info_file($theme->filename), $defaults); What this does is merge the [scripts] arrays together so that instead of only getting one as the result, both are added: [scripts] => Array ( [1] => script2.js [2] => script.js ) This is also true for the regions, features, and stylesheets arrays; you have to replace everything in theme.info if you add more items there, and using array_merge_recursive() fixes that problem. However, problems do arise for the non-array default items, such as description and screenshot. Since there is one in each array, the value at [description] and [screenshot] is an array instead of a string, so t() throws a "Warning: Illegal offset type in isset or empty in t() (line 1057 of C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\htdocs\drupal7\includes\common.inc)." error, and no screenshot is displayed on the themes page. So, in my opinion, it seems the best thing to do is: 1) Use array_merge_recursive() instead of + to merge the arrays; 2) Remove 'description' and 'screenshot' from the default settings in system_theme_default() I suppose code could be added to handle the description and screenshot values so only one is used, but what I've suggested seems neater. Sorry for the book length email, but I've never been accused of leaving out details.:-) Since this is my first core patch attempt, I just wanted to check with other more experienced core developers to see if there's something I'm not aware of that I need to be aware of. Thanks. Steve

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Kaltura Releases Version 1.0 of its Open Source Video Module for Drupal
by roni.r.kaltura 25 Dec '08

25 Dec '08

I'm excited to update you that today we have officially launched our open source video module for Drupal. Kaltura's All in One Video Module enables Drupal site-builders to easily add video and rich-media functionalities to their sites. The module handles all aspects of adding video, including full hosting and streaming of content. It is extremely flexible, easy to customize and best of all – it's free – Kaltura covers up to 10GB of hosting and streaming (can later be upgraded). It was designed specifically for Drupal and seamlessly integrates with several key Drupal features and modules, including CCK, Views, cron, tags and taxonomy, and user permissions. Download it: http://corp.kaltura.com/download Check it out on our demo site: http://drupal.kaltura.org/ Play around with it: http://drupal.kaltura.org/demo/ Tell us what you think in our forums: http://community.kaltura.org/ Hope you enjoy! -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Kaltura-Releases-Version-1.0-of-its-Open-Source-Video… Sent from the Drupal - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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