drupal planet

On one Drupal site I'm developing, there is an 'embed code generator' in one of the site's forms. This embed code capability is similar to Twitter's embeddable timeline widget, in that a user can select some parameters (colors, mostly), then some code (usually an iframe with the contents provided by an external site) is printed in a textarea, which the user can select, and paste into his own site's HTML.

To help the user in the task of selecting the code, the entire contents of the textarea or textfield is highlighted when the user clicks any part, which ensures that the user will get every last bit of code without having to select and drag his mouse around the text box (sometimes I've seen people missing part of a tag, which makes the embed fail to load). That's what we want to do, inside our own Drupal form.

First, in the drupal form itself (or via an hook_form_alter()), we need to attach a javascript file in our custom module (in this example, I assume you have a module called custom.module, and a js file named 'custom.select-helper.js' in your custom module's directory, inside a 'js' folder):

Now that I've released a Drupal 6 backport of what I originally wrote as a Drupal 7 module, I figured I would write a little bit in the way of introducing one of the simpler, and more user-friendly ways of controlling spam in Drupal (as opposed to other also-helpful methods, like Mollom, CAPTCHA, etc.).

I'd like to thank Flocknote for giving me the development time to work on this module, as we needed something like it for the new 'version 3' launch of www.flocknote.com.

I've been getting errors like General error: Can't create/write to file, Error 2006: MySQL server has gone away, and other similar PDOExceptions and errors from time to time while developing on my Mac using MAMP Pro (this seems to happen more often with Drupal 7 sites than Drupal 6, for reasons I know not). I've noticed a few other developers are getting these errors too, and almost always on local environments as opposed to live servers.

I found that the easiest way to deal with them is by giving MySQL a nice buffer of memory via the max_allowed_packet and innodb_buffer_pool_size settings. Just bump those up to 256M or higher, and the errors above should go away. (In MAMP Pro, just go to File > Edit Templates > my.cnf, and search for those variables. Uncomment the innodb_buffer_pool_size variable if it's commented out.

Drupal 7. Is it ready?

That seems to be the general question in the air over the past few weeks discussed by many in the community. There's a problem with this question, though... I think many people look at their particular use cases, determine Drupal 7 to not (yet) be a good fit, then declare all things Drupal 7 to be lacking.

Really, though, are things so bad? I've seen hundreds of sites on Drupal Gardens that are beautiful and functional. I've upgraded two of my simpler Drupal 6 sites to Drupal 7. I've built a total of fifteen Drupal 7 sites—some serving more than 10,000 visitors a day, others serving a hundred or two (and almost all on shared hosting!)—and am working on three others. So, for me, the question 'Is Drupal 7 ready for prime-time?' doesn't make sense. It's already there (I haven't started a new project on Drupal 6 for six months now).

How do you know you've been thinking about work too much? When your wife relates a conversation she had with you in the morning, and you don't remember a word, but can definitely see how what you said relates to what you're working on:

Saith my wife: "Jeff, how do you set your alarm?"

My (groggy) reply: "Hit field, the arrow, then default."

Now, this could possibly have something to do with alarm clocks. There are often arrows on them, and you hit buttons... but I know better. I was referring to:

$this->addFieldMapping('field', 'source')->defaultValue(0);

...which I have probably typed about 100 times in the past week, and maybe 20 or so last night during a late-night debugging session with the Migration process of flockNote v2 to v3 (from a proprietary WAMP-based system to a new Drupal 7 LAMP-based system).

For a while (earlier in my Drupal career), I was avoiding adding imagefield-attached images to nodes that appeared in my search results, because I remember the first time I tried doing so, I was still quite confused by the way drupal handled search results theming.

Well, after another crack at it, I finally have a nice, performant way of displaying images from nodes added via imagefields (or in drupal 7, image fields) inline with search results, and it didn't require much work at all!

The image above shows inline images for LOLSaints.com, a site which uses Midwestern Mac's Hosted Apache Solr search service to return results quickly and allows faceting, etc. using the excellent Apache Solr Search Integration module. But the technique I'm using works equally well with built-in (but slower) Drupal core search module's results.

[UPDATE: Here is a much simpler method for editing a user's roles.]

I thought there might be some sort of API function that allows me to add a user role to a user object by the role id (rid), but after looking at user_save() and some other information around the Drupal universe (like this thread), it looks like it's not as easy as I'd hoped. Definitely not like node_save(), where you just modify the node object, save it, and you're done!

I wrote this helper function that you could stick in your own custom module (tested with Drupal 7), which lets you add roles as simply as:

  custom_add_role_to_user($user->uid, 'role name here');

Here's the function:

The References module in Drupal 7 allows for easy creation and removal of user and node references through Drupal's interface. However, programmatically adding and removing these references is a little more difficult.

You basically have to load the node which has the reference in it, edit the reference field (in my example, the reference field can have an unlimited number of references), add or remove the user ID (or node ID if you're chaging a node reference), and save the node.

Let's look at the example of simply adding a user reference to a node:

It takes a little more effort to remove a user reference (or node reference) from a node. For this, since I have to do it for a few different fields on a node, I've written a helper function that removes a given $uid from the array of user references on a given node.

[Update: Views 3.x has a really nifty plugin feature called 'Results summary' that you can simply add to the header or footer of your view, and use your own text with placeholders, to do everything I outline in the post below, without a line of code. Add a results summary instead of using hook_views_pre_render() or a Views PHP field.]

I needed to display a page/item counter on a view on one of my Drupal 7 sites, using Views 7.x-3.x. This counter would display at the bottom of the view, just above the pager, and needed to display the current number of results being displayed, along with the total number of results.

Views provides all this data right inside the $views object, so all I needed to do was add the following PHP snippet (including the <?php ?> delimiters) to a 'Global: PHP' textarea in my view's footer:

In Drupal 6, I would often resort to using my theme's template.php file to implement template_preprocess(), and add in the class to Drupal's $body_classes array. In Drupal 7, some new hooks were introduced that allow me to do this more easily, and inside my .module files.

Introducing hook_preprocess_HOOK()