php

I've worked with a wide variety of developers, designers, content managers, and the other Drupal users in the past few years, and I'm pretty sure I have a handle on most of the reasons people think Drupal is a horrible platform. But before I get to that, I have to set up the rest of this post with the following quote:

There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions of people who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church — which is, of course, quite a different thing.

Forgive me for diverging slightly into my faith, but this quote is from the late Fulton J. Sheen, and is in reference to the fact that so many people pour hatred on the Catholic Church not because of what the Church actually teaches, but because of what they think the Catholic Church teaches. Once someone comes to understand the actual teaching, they are free to agree or disagree with it—but there are comparatively few people who disagree with teachings they actually understand.

Similarly, the problems most people have with Drupal—and with systems like it—are problems not with Drupal, but with their perception of Drupal.

Java Jane: One-off vs. Flexible Design

A Java developer (let's call her Jane) is used to creating a bunch of base object classes and a schema for a database by hand, then deploying an application and managing the database through her own wrapper code. Jane is assigned to a Drupal project, takes one look at the database, and decides that no sane person would ever design a schema with hundreds of tables named field_data_* and field_revision_* for every single data point in the application!

In reality, Drupal is doing this because The Drupal Way dictates that things like field data should be: flexible (able to be used by different kinds of entities (content)), able to be translated, able to be revised with a trackable history, and able to be stored in different storage backends (e.g. MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, SQLite, etc.). If the fields were all stored in a per-entity table as separate columns, these different traits would be much more difficult to implement.

Thus, The Drupal Way is actually quite beneficial—if you want a flexible content management system.

I think a lot of developers hate Drupal because they know they could build a more efficient web application that only has the minimal required features they need by simply writing everything from scratch (or using a barebones framework). But what about the next 72 times you have to build the exact same thing, except slightly different each time, with a feature that's different here, translation abilities there, integration with Active Directory for user login here, integration with a dozen APIs there, etc.?

There's a maxim that goes something like: Every seasoned web developer started with plain HTML and CSS, or some hosted platform, then discovered a dynamic scripting language and built his own CMS-like system. Then, after building the CMS into a small system like many others but hopelessly insecure and unmaintainable, the developer realized that thousands of other people went through the same progression and ultimately worked together on systems like Drupal. Then said developer starts using Drupal, and the rest is history.

I know you could build a small system that beats the pants off Drupal performance-wise, and handles the three features you need done now. But why spend hours on a login form (that probably has security holes), session handling (ditto), password storage (ditto) forms in general (ditto), content CRUD interfaces, a translation system, a theme layer, etc., when you can have that out of the box, and just spend a little time making it look and behave like you want it? The shoulders of giants and all that...

.Net Neil: Letting Contrib/Bespoke Code Let You Down

A .Net developer (lets call him Neil) joins a Drupal project team after having worked on a small custom .Net application for a few years. Not only does he not know PHP (so he's learning by seeing the code already in use), he is also used to a tightly-controlled application code structure, which he knows and owns end-to-end.

PHP's command line interface doesn't respect the max_execution_time limit within your php.ini settings. This can be both a blessing and a curse (but more often the latter). There are some drush scripts that I run concurrently for batch operations that I want to make sure don't run away from me, because they perform database operations and network calls, and can sometimes slow down and block other operations.

Can you tell when the batch got backlogged? CPU usage spiked to 20, and threads went from 100 to 400.

I found that some large batch operations (where there are hundreds of thousands of items to work on) would hold the server hostage and cause a major slowdown, and when I went to the command line and ran:

For the past couple years, discussions about 'PSR-0', PHP standards, and some sort of framework standardizations have been popping up here and there. It wasn't until a bunch of 'PSR-0 Interoperability' patches started popping up in the Drupal core issue queues that I decided to take a closer look at PSR. (The latest? PSR-1 (Basic Coding Standard) and PSR-2 (Coding Style Guide) have been accepted).

[Note: Since writing this post, I've created the Ping class for PHP, which incorporates three different ping/latency/uptime methods for PHP, and is a lot more robust than the script I have posted below.]

I recently needed to display some ping/server statistics on a website using PHP. The simplest way to do something like this is to use the built-in linux utility ping, and then parse the results. Instead of doing complex regex with the entirety of ping's output, though, I also used a couple other built-in linux utilities to get just what I needed.

Here's how I got just the response time of a given IP address:

The above script will ping the given IP address, and simply pull out the response time in milliseconds. You can further parse the response time to just be the numeric value by running it through substr($ping_time[0], 5).

I had a rather interesting feature to implement on flocknote lately (after doing a pretty vast redesign of the UX/UI on the site over the past month... it was refreshing to dig into PHP again!):

We want to allow insertion of YouTube and Vimeo (and potentially other) videos into 'Notes' on the site, and there are a few moving parts in this equation:

• I had to create a text format filter similar to the 'Embedded media inline' module in Drupal 6 so people could simply put a 'merge tag' in their Note (like [video=URL]) where they want the video to appear.
• When a user views the embedded video on the site, the video should show at a uniform width/height, and be able to play the video (basically, a merge tag the user enters should be converted to the proper embed code for the provider (in this case, an <iframe> with the proper formatting).
• When a user sees the video in the note email, the video can't actually play since very few email clients support any kind of video embedded in an email. So, instead, the video shows as a frame with a play button on top (this is the trickiest part), and links to the video on YouTube, Vimeo, etc.

Creating my own Image Effect for a Video Play Button

What I wanted to end up with was an image that had a custom-made iOS-style play button (play icon in a circle with a translucent grey background) right in the middle (I like the simple look of videos on my iPad...):

So, I decided to work with Drupal's Image Effect API and expose a new image effect, aptly named 'Video Play Button', to Drupal's simple set of 'Resize, Scale, etc.' image effects. This is a pretty simple process:

[Note: It looks like there's a new module, as of January 2013, Node Comment Block, which uses the technique outlined below to move comments into a block.]

Most of the time, Drupal's convention of printing comments and the comment form inside the node template (node.tpl.php) is desirable, and doesn't cause any headaches.

However, I've had a few cases where I wanted to either put comments and the comment form in another place on the page, and in the most recent case, I asked around to see what people recommended for moving comments out of the normal rendering method. I found a few mentions of using Panels, and also noticed the Commentsblock module that does something like this using Views.

However, I just wanted to grab the normal comment information, and stick it directly into a block, and put that block somewhere else. I didn't want Views' overhead, or to have to re-theme and tweak things in Views, since I already have a firm grasp of comment rendering and form theming with the core comment display.

So, I set out to do something similar to this comment on drupal.org (which was also suggested by Jimajamma on Drupal Answers).

After reading through a ton of documentation posts and forum topics for Amazon SES about this issue, I finally found this post about the string list format that helped me be able to send an email with Amazon SES's sendmail API to multiple recipients.

Every way I tried getting this working, I was receiving errors like InvalidParameter for the sender, Unexpected list element termination for the error code, etc.

Normally, when sending email, you can either pass a single address or multiple addresses as a string, and you'll be fine:

apachebench is an excellent performance and load-testing tool for any website, and Drupal-based sites are no exception. A lot of Drupal sites, though, need to be measured not only under heavy anonymous traffic load (users who aren't logged in), but also under heavy authenticated-user load.

Drupal.org has some good tips for ab testing, but the details for using ab's '-C' option (notice the capital C... C is for Cookie) are lacking. Basically, if you pass the -C option with a valid session ID/cookie, Drupal will send ab the page as if ab were authenticated.

Instead of constantly going into the database and looking up session IDs and such nonsense, I have a simple script, which is quite revised from the 2008-era script originally from 2bits that worked with Drupal 5, which will give you the proper ab commands for stress-testing your Drupal site under authenticated user load. Simply copy the attached script (source pasted below) to your site's docroot, and run the command from the command line as follows:

I've had a nice go at making private messaging capabilities for flockNote work a lot nicer than the out-of-the-box Privatemsg module experience, by simplifying everything to the point that it's closer to the Facebook Direct Message system than the normal Privatemsg UX. (Privatemsg is the premiere way of handling private messaging in Drupal. It's already awesome out of the box... just needed a bit more help for our particular site ;-).

One thing I had wanted to do for a while is prefill the subject field of certain messages. I already have the new private message page appear inside an overlay popup after a user clicks on a link to send a private message to another user on the site.

After staring at a todo in my inbox for a few weeks, I finally got around to doing it on the flight back from Boston yesterday. I simply wanted an easy, quick, at-a-glance way of telling what time it was in different timezones/cities around the US (and eventually around the world).

So, I created Alltheti.me:

(as displayed on the iPad)

I've been wanting something like this for quite some time, and I finally got a few hours to play around with dates and times in PHP and JavaScript. The times may not be quite right when viewed in certain timezones, so I'd appreciate if any friends from outside US Central time could tell me if their own times are correct.