Dave Reid - drupal planet

Contact module love

Dave Reid — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:06:11 +0000

In the last week leading up to the end of the Drupal 7 code slush, there has been a flurry of work and love going into core's Contact module. I'd like to share what has been going on with everyone else.

Anonymous user access to personal contact forms

Contact module provides personal contact forms that allow users to contact other users on the site (e.g. user/1/contact). Unfortunately if you wanted to allow anonymous users to be able to contact users in the same manner, it just wasn't possible. In Drupal core, we should not limit functionality from anonymous users, but rather features should be linked to permissions for the site administrator to choose who can do what.

This feature request was originally posted on April 11, 2006 and was nearing a rivalry with the DBTNG issue for the highest number of comments for an issue. Obviously lots of people were interested in or needed this feature. I'm proud to announce that on the issue's exact three-and-a-half year anniversary, it has finally been committed to core! For those of you interested in this for Drupal 6, I am working on back-porting this functionality into the Anonymous Contact module.

This was Contact module's own personal node/8 so we can finally let it rest in peace. There were tons of people helping with that issue and I'd like to help recognize them. The following users all helped post patches and kept the issue driving: karschsp, matt@antinomia, David Lesieur, Owen Barton, pwolanin, TBarregren, coltrane, mrtoner, deviantintegral, rleigh, swaroopch, and jonhinkle. Several other people helped review: mfer, scottrigby, greg.harvey, binford2k. I could go on forever so I apologize if I left you out.

Official maintainer

I've been posting and reviewing patches for contact.module for a while now and was starting to feel personally responsible for it, so I asked to be added as the official maintainer and it was approved! I'm excited to be helping drive long-needed improvements and bug fixes to a module that doesn't get as much recognition as it's bigger brother modules. I'd also like to thank users gpk and andypost for helping out in several issues.

State of the Drupal XML Sitemap 2009

Dave Reid — Tue, 05 May 2009 18:38:33 +0000

Note: this is a serious post, but I had to have a little fun and wanted to parody Barack Obama's 2009 State of the Union speech.

I've come here today not only to address the distinguished men and women in this great community, but to speak frankly and directly about everyone's favorite Drupal module, XML sitemap. I know that for many Drupalers reading right now, the state of the module is a concern. And rightly so. If you haven't been personally affected by this module, you probably know someone who has--a friend; a neighbor; a co-worker. But while the module's reputation may be weakened and our confidence shaken, tonight I want every Drupaler to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the XML sitemap module will emerge stronger than before.

So how did things get this bad?

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of using XML sitemap yet, I think Angie Byron (webchick) and Jeff Eaton said it best:

webchick: "Dear XMLSiteMap module: Please die. And not in that cute, friendly way. I mean I literally hope you get hit by a bus. Twice."
eaton: "Uhoh. Brainstorming a #drupal site assessment drinking game with @quicksketch ... "XMLSitemap? Finish your drink."

The last stable/official release of the module was the 5.x-1.6 version from almost a year ago. There is a 5.x-2.x version that was supposed to fix problems in 5.x-1.6. For over a year, the 6.x-1.x-dev version has been a work-in progress port of the unfinished 5.x-2.x version. Despite there not being any stable 6.x release, there are over 10,000 people using development builds which are buggy, frequently failed on updates, and could not scale to large sites. This of course, leads to several issues in the queue with over 200 replies with recurring themes of frustration and impatience.

Much like the current US/world recession, I can't assign blame to any one person or problem. The current maintainer, Kiam was very active and would keep hacking away at the module, fixing problems, but sometimes introducing new ones. For the 25th most popular Drupal module, there was a lack of regulation (peer code review) that we usually see in other popular or large modules. There was no way to say that a change won't work, or something is a bad idea until after the code had been changed. Some developers that needed a working module for their clients would take one look at the code and issue queue and would promptly run away, seeing no other short-term solution besides writing their own custom implementation. The people who's input and time could help the most did not need or want to help contribute back. Those who did make honest efforts were frustrated with language barriers or misunderstandings. There was no test coverage for the module, which I also can't blame since writing SimpleTests for an existing, largish module which you didn't originally write is really hard. But new features would be added and bugs would be fixed without ensuring that they would work correctly.

Preparing your modules for Drupal 7

Dave Reid — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:45:41 +0000

I know it seems like a far distance away and as much as you'd like to ignore it, Drupal 7 is coming and it will be awesome. Some ambitious developers have actually started with Drupal 7 version of their modules, but what if you just want to get a little head start? I'll show you a few ways that you can help prepare your Drupal 6 modules now to help make life easier when you full port to Drupal 7 later on. To see a list of all the current 6.x to 7.x module changes, view http://drupal.org/node/224333.

Drupal OpenDNS Shortcuts

Dave Reid — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 02:09:55 +0000

For a while I had been using the OpenSearch browser plugins to help me search Drupal.org, and different versions of the Drupal APIs. But now I have found an even better method using OpenDNS. If you are not using the OpenDNS service already, I highly suggest you do! Not only does it provide fast and reliable DNS lookups, typo correction, and anti-phishing protection, but also a handy little feature called shortcuts, which lets you map a short term to a long URL via the address bar. This feature is pretty identical to FireFox's Smart Keywords, but they will work on any computer and any browser! As a Drupal developer, I have found the following shortcuts very useful to quickly get to certain areas on drupal.org:

d7 http://api.drupal.org/api/search/7/%s 
d6 http://api.drupal.org/api/search/6/%s 
d5 http://api.drupal.org/api/search/5/%s 
dn http://drupal.org/node/%s 
dp http://drupal.org/project/%s 
dpi http://drupal.org/project/issues/%s 
php http://php.net/%s (thanks Freso)

So if I type "dpi path_redirect" in my browser's address bar, I will automatically be directed to http://drupal.org/project/issues/path_redirect. Do you have any handy shortcuts that you use? Please comment and share them!

Drupal.org redesign sprints

Dave Reid — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 16:43:00 +0000

Undoubtedly Drupal's biggest community asset is the Drupal.org website itself, which has been in need of a major redesign for quite some time. As our community has grown quickly, Drupal.org has not grown with the features and usability needed to match. The good news is that the redesign planning is nearly finished, but we are nearing a very critical task. We need to upgrade Drupal.org and all its modules to run on Drupal 6 before we can actually implement the redesign. With Drupal 7 coming up quickly in Q4 2009, and Drupal 6 released almost a year ago, we are still running our biggest asset on the much-less-awesome, nearing-end-of-life version 5.

Dries and the Drupal Association have started organizing redesign sprints over the next two months to concentrate effort and focus, the first of which is dedicated to the massive task of upgrading Drupal.org. Along with many other contributors, I've volunteered my time and effort to attend the sprint in Boston. But like myself, some of us aren't sponsored and require financial assistance to attend. Please consider reading http://drupal.org/node/356002 and donating to this important cause that will further expand Drupal's reach and to provide us better tools to communicate and collaborate.

Restricted content - Yet-another-but-different Drupal node access module

Dave Reid — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 08:22:25 +0000

I previously posted about my search for my ideal content access module. Since then I've done a lot of searching and digging through the source code of all the most popular content access modules. I've come to realize there was really no module currently out there that had the features I was looking for. A quick review of the feature wish list:

Per-content access restricted by user roles
If the content is restricted to user, don't just hide the node, but rather show a message in place of the content like "Sorry, this post has been restricted to users with the following roles: registered user, friend."
If the current user is anonymous and the content is restricted, also show a message like "Please create an account to view this content." with a link to the user register page, of course.

The built-in Drupal node access system is not really ideal for this direction since there's absolutely no middle ground between, "This user can view the node" and "OMG! Hide this node completely!" So today I started Restricted content, a yet-another-but-totally-different node access module. After only a couple hours of coding, it seems to be working fairly well, minus any kind of testing framework (I swear I'll get right on it webchick!). The content restriction messages shown to the user are customizable and can be integrated with token for some cool token replacement. For anyone daring enough to try it or even just take a look at the code, your comments and feedback are wanted and welcome here or in the issue queue. Hopefully some of you can find this useful like I have!

Kaltura All in One Video module link spam warning

Dave Reid — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:24:20 +0000

Since the Kaltura module was announced in the forums, discussed recently on Drupal Planet, and "advertised" on the development mailing list, it has come to the attention of Morbus and myself that the Kaltura All in One Video module contains unacceptable code that creates unwanted and hidden SEO link spam. The code is present in both their Drupal module and their WordPress plugin (which has gone unnoticed for quite some time). Interestingly enough, the same is not found in their MediaWiki plugin, because I can only assume they were paid to write that one.

It is stunning (and kinda funny) to think that some people still believe they can get away with such a dirty and nasty practice, especially in open source software. At the time of this post, the company has yet to respond in either of the posts in their forums (linked above). Anyone not wanting to be punished by Google and lose rankings should probably disable the module immediately. This is just another reason why I will always recommend to do a quick read of a module's source code before you use it. The offending code is in the full post if you'd like to check it out yourself.

Drupal reset script

Dave Reid — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 03:56:30 +0000

I needed a script to use with Drupal CVS HEAD during the testing and patch review process that deletes all the current database tables and starts a fresh re-install. There's maybe a better solution out there, but this works for me right now. Below is the code in the 'reset.php' file in the root of my Drupal install. I've also included an archive of the reset.php and developer profile that automates the whole process. Just extract the contents in the root of your Drupal directory, and go to 'http://yourdrupalpath/reset.php'.

WARNING: This deletes your current database tables and should not be used on any kind of site that you value your data. This has only been tested on a Drupal 7 (CVS HEAD) install.

FeedBurner Drupal 6.x-1.0 Beta

Dave Reid — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 02:10:00 +0000

The 6.x-1.0 beta2 version of the FeedBurner Drupal module is now available, bringing the last few major features I wanted to get in, mainly the email subscription and feed count blocks. My primary focuses for the module are now: Views module feed integration, back-porting the module to 5.x, documentation, and testing. Please give the new version of the module a try and report any bugs! I think I'm also going to try and get my module reviewed by the wonderful chx and Morbus of Drupal Tough Love.

I will have to be closely monitoring the status of the Feedburner to Google Feedburner transition. As of now, the module still works just fine if you have your feeds served by Google. You just need to change the MyBrand domain in the module settings to 'feedproxy.google.com.'

And of course if you like the module, please donate to my laptop fund or review it on drupalmodules.com.

Accurate Read Count - New Drupal Module

Dave Reid — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:17:00 +0000

UPDATE: I decided this module was too specific and had no room to grow at all, so I created a new module, Statistics Advanced Settings that includes an improved version of Accurate Read Count.

Well that was fun! In about a total of two hours, I was able to code, cvs commit and create the project page for a new module of mine, Accurate Read Count. I think that's pretty good for only my third module.

So what does it do you ask? Do you like seeing how many times your content has been read using the core statistics module? Did you know that every time you view a node, even if you're logged in, the read counter is incremented? Any Drupal user could easily inflate the read counters just by normal site administration alone. Crazy! I've been keeping track of bug #90468: Only record unique hits in node counter stats and I even tried my first core patch there a while back. Seeing as this bug is not going to be fixed in Drupal 6.x (the bug is slated to be fixed in 7.x), I decided to create a simple module that would work with the core statistics module and disregard any non-unique content views.