Drupal

If you're looking at the site now - instead of reading it through a feedreader - you will notice that the site looks... different. Otherwise, you might have noticed that the feed, along with the rest of the site has been offline multiple times this weekend.

Some serverside problems allegedly caused by 'scripts' on hoeben.net prodded me to bite the bullet and update to Drupal 5.x. The update did not go as smooth as I have come accustomed with Drupal updates, but things seem to be working ok now. I hope to reintroduce the subthemes for different sections of the site soon(ish).

I've been putting lots of time in the IVRPA site. Most of it is behind the scenes work to keep things running, and I fairly often get to contribute changes to Drupal modules back to the Drupal project. But now for the first time, I have contributed 2 new modules to the Drupal project, which I will maintain myself.

'me aliases'
Provides shortcut paths to current user's pages, eg user/me, blog/me, user/me/edit, tracker/me etc.

This means logged in users no longer have to know/remember their uid, and it makes it easier to link to user-specific pages from a site help page (without resorting to using php to put $user->uid in the link).

If you've wondered why I have been so quiet, that's because I have been far too busy doing far too many things.
One of those things is building a new site for the IVRPA, which I just released to the world!

The new IVRPA website project started - ahem - more than a year back. Since then, I joined the IVRPA Board of Directors, and the new website has been my brainchild since. Like hoeben.net, and the SPi-V developers' site before, I based the IVRPA website on Drupal. But for the IVRPA site, I've had to take my Drupal knowledge to a whole new level. From advanced theming to lots of smaller and bigger patches contributed to the Drupal projects/modules that make the IVRPA site tick and even a small module of my own... To keep up with developments of the site, I recommend keeping an eye on my developer blog over at the new site.

Hoeben.net is now running Drupal 4.7.2, the latest production release.

Still some things left to upgrade (most notably TinyMCE) and there's also some CSS tweaking left to do, but the good news is that search is back in working order. Anonymous comments are back (yes, they were gone for a while), but I'll have to see how well the 4.7 spam module works...

The search facility is currently not returning any results. Sorry 'bout that.

I hope to be upgrading to Drupal 4.7 'soonish', but there's another big Drupal project in my way. More about that in a few days (I hope).

Update: The search facility has long since been restored.

As of this morning, there's an actual bit of code in the CVS version of the core of Drupal. 4 lines of code in 4 different files. Woohoo! I have submitted a patch here and there before, but this is the first time a patch of mine is accepted into the core of Drupal.

So what's this patch about you might wonder? In the admin area of drupal - which most of you will never see - you can now see the referrer of a page that caused an error (such as a 'file not found' error). Exciting stuff.

It looks like they picked my version of the patch too...

This post was made on a local copy of the Hoeben.net website. I am trying to upgrade Drupal to version 4.6 (up from version 4.4.3)

So far, things are going ok-ish. What kept me back before was that I did some customisation to the menu module that isn't even available for Drupal 4.5 and up because parts of its functionality are now in a core Drupal module. As a result, the menu system will need some work to get it back to where it was.

One of the neater modules available in Drupal 4.6 is the tinyMCE WYSIWYG module. It's a pretty dramatic improvement over typing HTML code into a standard text area. Unfortunately it conflicts with the linewrap filter in Drupal, so I am turning that off for new content. But then again, posts made through other interfaces such as XMLRPC should ideally still use this filter so users don't have to add <p> tags manually...

This morning I conducted a quick experiment installing the newly released Drupal 4.5 release candidate. It breaks some modules (most notably for Hoeben.net the menu system is superceeded) and the theming system got a makeover, so the transfer won't be made with the flick of a button... Some hacking will be involved, and I don;t have time for that now.

But if - in the near future - the site looks funny or goes totally off-the-air, you know why: I have found some time to tinker with the software running the site ;-)

I slightly changed how the menus.module displays menu blocks. menus.module allows you to add custom menu blocks to Drupal's navigation system, based on taxonomy vocabularies.

Specifically, I added the possibility to make the title of the menu block a link. You can see this in action in the top menu bar, as requested demanded by Ianus.