joachim.noreiko's blog

Getting Stuff Done

Basically, an initial patch went in, we opened followup issues for cleanup, the followup issues never got followed up, so what's in HEAD is a bit of a mess. — catch, in a recent issue comment

This happens far too often. I'm not linking to the specific issue in the Drupal 7 queue because I don't want to point fingers; this suffices to exemplify my point.

Services, or How I Learned We're All Just Secretly hook_menu()

I am now batting nodes, complete with imagefield, between separate instances of Drupal with merriment and glee. For yes, I do have a working beta of Content distribution.

I'm about to quickly write a service to get CCK's content_fields() array from the remote, distributing site, so that the retrieving site can show a UI of possible values for a Views nodereference argument. Try it. It all makes sense once you do.

Why Is Writing Drupal Documentation Harder Than Writing Wikipedia?

I used to write on Wikipedia, years ago when it was a wild frontier, we had barely 30 thousand articles, and not even my geek friends had heard of it from a source other than my blathering on about it.

Files Aren't Visible From All Domains Of A Site

I had a fun afternoon a few months back when all the imagecache images broke on a site I'd just taken live. I've just figured it out, so I'm telling you about it.

This was the situation:

  • subsite.client.com was where I was developing the site, one of a family of multisites.
  • subsite.com was a parked domain that went to just this site. It was this I'd just pointed to the IP of the box and that wasn't showing any images.

On the development domain, all worked fine. On the subsite domain, nothing.

Multisite On localhost Without Virtual Hosts

I've been putting off setting up multisite on my localhost for ages, mostly because in the past I've found getting Apache virtual hosts to work can be a bit tricky: not impossible, but the sort of thing where I could easily lose an hour on a minor thing I've forgotten to do. And after all, with a shiny new iMac and a hard drive whose proportions I can't even remember, why not just 'drush dl' all over again?

But I'm actually working on a multisite project at the moment, and suddenly getting this to work becomes more interesting than having another SVN copy of my code kicking around.

Given multisite can respond to subfolders, I was wondering if this could work when Drupal itself is in a subfolder, like this:

Counting Hooks

This (fairly long) one-liner counts the number of implementations of each hook in your Drupal installation:

ack "Implements? hook_" | perl -e 'while (<>) { m[(hook_\w+)] and $hooks{$1}++; } foreach (keys %hooks) { print "$_ - $hooks{$_}\n"; }'

To count only install file hooks, which was what I was doing, give ack the option "-G '.install'" thus:

ack "Implements? hook_" -G '.install' | perl -e 'while (<>) { m[(hook_\w+)] and $hooks{$1}++; } foreach (keys %hooks) { print "$_ - $hooks{$_}\n"; }'

Six Reasons To Get A Handbook Page For Your Module

Checkout view being currently disabled in ViewVC is a very good opportunity to remind everyone that linking to your README.txt file in CVS does not count as documentation on your project page!

Here are some things I, or anyone else, can do with a proper documentation page in what used to be called the handbooks section of drupal.org:

  • Correct it.
  • Expand on it.
  • Clarify things for newbies.

Nodes As NIDs

Is it just me who finds this poor style and potentially confusing:

<?php
function my_function($nodes) {
  foreach (
$nodes as $nid) {
   
// do stuff
 
}
}
?>

To me, a variable names $nodes will be an array of nodes -- that is, node objects. If it's an array of nids, I would call it $nids to avoid confusion about what we have there.

I'm curious if other people agree (in other words, is it worth my time writing a patch for core or will it just lead to bikeshedding?)

Creating A Set Of Fields In One Swell Foop

Situation: you need a heap of imagefields that more or less have the same setup. Let's not go into why.

You could spend half an hour bored witless clicking through the interface.

Or you could create just the one field, export the content type with content copy, and then doctor the code a little before importing it back in. Like this....

<?php
// The usual content type stuff here.
// Set of image fields
$image_fields = array(
'field_image_1' => 'Image 1',
'field_image_2' => 'Image 2',
// etc
);

foreach ($image_fields as $name => $label) {

Translation: Proving Complicated

Editor's note: Joachim appreciates this may be a bit of a rant, and hopes people who read this and know more about the translation of Drupal than he will contribute via the Comments and tell him why he's being an idiot. But we decided to run with it because he makes some really valid points. I don't know if the translation interface was a part of the UI work for Drupal 7, but reading Joachim's experiences, I would hope so!

Rant starts here:

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