I had an interesting gotcha this afternoon. With Drupal 6.x came a new hook, hook_boot(). It supercedes the !$may_cache behaviour in Drupal 5.x by providing a hook that any code which *must* run on all pages, cached or otherwise, can be placed in.

This is pretty useful, because unlike hook_init() which only fires on pages that are not cached, hook_boot() always fires.

I've finally updated this site to Drupal 6.6. It's using a new theme, because my old one isn't ready yet. I may port it myself, as my girlfriend says she liked the green, but for now it's grey and claret.

Hope you like the new colours!

Worth reporting there were no real updating issues for any of the modules. This site uses:

• CCK
• Date
• Email Field
• Link Field
• Pathauto
• Token
• Node Comments
• Views
• Codefilter
• CAPTCHA
• Google Analytics
• Node Images

I've just started using the SOAP Client module in Drupal to handle SOAP requests. It's a great little tool. If you set it to use the nuSOAP PHP libraries (instead of core) it even handles Microsoft datasets, which some Microsoft-based web services will return.

There is one small problem. Documentation is approximately zero! The only assistance offered is "look at the code of the admin test form", which is great for simple name/value pairs of data, but doesn't tackle complex types.

I've been having a lot of fun with preprocess functions in Drupal 6.x, particularly when theming Views. It's a great system, but my colleague came across a nice "gotcha" this morning.

We have been adding JavaScript in Views preprocess functions if we want to provide tidy jQuery interfaces for Views output. This works great, so we thought nothing of doing the same for pages, which is where we came unstuck.

To understand why, you need to understand the process order of preprocess functions, as defined here:
http://drupal.org/node/223430

Who remembers good ol' Views 1.x in Drupal 5.x? Lovely, wasn't it? With that theming wizard. Giving you all the phptemplate functions you needed for fine-grained theming, ready to paste in to template.php in your theme and fiddle with until everything looks perfect.

And I was sooo close! I actually decided to upgrade to Drupal 6.4 this evening. All the modules I use are ready, everything works, so I was all set to take the plunge.

But my theme, Dichotomy, has not been ported. In fact, it's never even been marked a point release. =(

Looks like I'll have to either port it myself or change theme. Any suggestions??
http://drupal.org/project/themes

I kinda like this one, but it's a complete departure from the status quo:
http://drupal.org/project/interactive_media

Ditto:

Many of you are probably familiar with drupal_execute(). However, those familiar with it from Drupal 5.x days will have to watch a new feature in Drupal 6.x.

Here's an example of an item in a hook_menu() implementation in the Taxonomy module for Drupal 6.x:

<?php
$items['admin/content/taxonomy/add/vocabulary'] = array(
'title' => 'Add vocabulary',
'page callback' => 'drupal_get_form',
'page arguments' => array('taxonomy_form_vocabulary'),

So, you want to create an SOA-based infrastructure for some or all of your business tools and web sites? Not sure where to start?

I'll admit I have worked a little with Microsoft web services, but I am fairly ignorant of the open source alternatives out there for SOA. What I can tell you is I'm hugely impressed with the new Services module for Drupal. It is still in dev, but it's pretty cool!

So, you want to have many websites with many different content sets but a shared set of users, roles and sessions? Not a problem. There are many ways to skin the Drupal multi-site cat.