Drupal

I bought a new laptop at the start of this year, and since then I've experienced the "privilege" pile of festering camel dung that is being a user of Windows Vista. As with most things in Vista, installing Drupal and Apache is finickier than it used to be, back on XP. When I first went through the process, I encountered a few particularly weird little gotchas, and I scribbled them down for future reference. Here are some things to look out for, when the inevitable day comes in which you too will shine the light of Drupal upon the dark and smelly abyss of Vista:

1. Don't use the stop / start / restart Apache controls in the start menu (start > programs > Apache > control), as they are unreliable; use services.msc insetad (start > run > "services.msc").
2. Don't edit httpd.conf through the filesystem — use the 'edit httpd.conf' icon in the start menu instead (start > programs > Apache > configure), as otherwise your saved changes may not take effect.
3. If you're seeing the error message "http request status - fails" on Drupal admin pages, then try editing your 'c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts' file, and taking out the IPv6 mapping of localhost, as this can confuse the Windows mapping of 127.0.0.1 to localhost (restart for this to take effect).
4. Don't use Vista! If, however, you absolutely have no choice, then refer to steps 1-3.

The past week has been a big one, for the small but growing Sydney Drupal Users' Group. Last week, on Tuesday through Thursday (May 20-22), we manned the first-ever Drupal stall at the annual Sydney CeBIT Expo. CeBIT is one of the biggest technology shows in Australia — and the original CeBIT in Germany is the biggest exhibition in the world. For three days, we helped "spread the word" by handing out leaflets, running lives demos, and talking the talk to the Expo's many visitors.

Volunteers manning the Sydney CeBIT Drupal stall (on Flickr).

Laptops running Drupal for passers-by (on Flickr).

The Sunday before (May 18), we also arranged a full-day get-together at the University of Sydney, as a warm-up for CeBIT: there were a few informal presentations, and we got some healthy geeked-up discussion happening.

Full-day "Barcamp" meetup at Sydney Uni (on Flickr).

The meetup was followed by dinner and drinks — and plenty of both (on Flickr).

The upcoming Drupal 6 has a very small but very useful new feature, which went into CVS quietly and with almost no fanfare about 6 weeks ago. The new feature is called "useful SQL error reporting". As any Drupal developer would know, whenever you're coding away at that whiz-bang new module, and you've made a mistake in one of your module's database queries, Drupal will glare at you with an error such as this:

user warning: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'd5_node n INNER JOIN d5_users u ON u.uid = n.uid INNER JOIN d5_node_revisions r ' at line 1 query: SELECT n.nid, n.vid, n.type, n.status, n.created, n.changed, n.comment, n.promote, n.sticky, r.timestamp AS revision_timestamp, r.title, r.body, r.teaser, r.log, r.format, u.uid, u.name, u.picture, u.data FROMMM d5_node n INNER JOIN d5_users u ON u.uid = n.uid INNER JOIN d5_node_revisions r ON r.vid = n.vid WHERE n.nid = 1 in C:\www\drupal5\includes\database.mysql.inc on line 172.

That message is all well and good: it tells you that the problem is an SQL syntax error; it prints out the naughty query that's causing you the problem; and it tells you that Drupal's "includes/database.mysql.inc" file is where the responsible code lies. But that last bit — about the "database.mysql.inc" file — isn't quite true, is it? Because although that file does indeed contain the code that executed the naughty query (namely, the db_query() function in Drupal's database abstraction system), that isn't where the query actually is.

In Drupal 6, this same message becomes a lot more informative:

user warning: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'd6_node n INNER JOIN d6_users u ON u.uid = n.uid INNER JOIN d6_node_revisions r ' at line 1 query: SELECT n.nid, n.vid, n.type, n.language, n.title, n.uid, n.status, n.created, n.changed, n.comment, n.promote, n.moderate, n.sticky, n.tnid, n.translate, r.nid, r.vid, r.uid, r.title, r.body, r.teaser, r.log, r.timestamp AS revision_timestamp, r.format, u.name, u.data FROMMM d6_node n INNER JOIN d6_users u ON u.uid = n.uid INNER JOIN d6_node_revisions r ON r.vid = n.vid WHERE n.nid = 2 in C:\www\drupal\modules\node\node.module on line 669.

This may seem like a small and insignificant new feature. But considering that a fair chunk of the average Drupal developer's debugging time is consumed by fixing SQL errors, it's going to be a godsend for many, many people. The value and the usefulness of this feature, for developers and for others, should not be underestimated.

I've just finished off two days down at the Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, where the OSCMS Summit 2007 was held, and where I experienced my first ever DrupalCon. You can read about my experiences by browsing the posts tagged with DrupalCon on my world trip site; and you can download the slides for my presentation on site structuring and navigation in Drupal right here.

This video screencast is part III of a series that documents the development of a new, real-life Drupal website from the ground up. It shows you how to create a custom theme that gives your site a unique look-and-feel, using Drupal's built-in PHPTemplate theme engine. Tasks that are covered include theming blocks, theming CCK node types, and theming views. Video produced by GreenAsh Services, and sponsored by Hambo Design. (21:58 min — 24.1MB H.264)

I hope that all you fellow Drupalites have enjoyed this series, and I wish you a very happy new year!

This video screencast is part II of a series that documents the development of a new, real-life Drupal website from the ground up. It shows you how to install a number of the more popular add-on modules from the contributions repository, and it steps through a detailed demonstration of how to configure these modules. The add-on modules that are covered include Views, CCK, Pathauto, and Category. Video produced by GreenAsh Services, and sponsored by Hambo Design. (28:44 min — 35.1MB H.264)

This video screencast is part I of a series that documents the development of a new, real-life Drupal website from the ground up. It shows you how to download Drupal 4.7, install it, and perform some basic initial configuration tasks. Video produced by GreenAsh Services, and sponsored by Hambo Design. (11:35 min — 10.2MB H.264)

After much delay, the stylish new 3rd edition of GreenAsh has finally hit the web! This is the first major upgrade that GreenAsh has had in almost 2 years, since it was ported over from home-grown CMS (v1) to Drupal (v2). The site has been upgraded from its decaying and zealously hacked Drupal 4.5 code base, to the latest stable (and much-less-hacked) 4.7 code base. It sports a snazzy new theme, complete with fresh branding, graphics, and content layout. It is using quite a few new modules that are only available in more recent versions of Drupal, including views, pathauto, and the improved captcha module. And, best of all, it has finally been switched over to the category module, which was built and documented by myself, and which had the purpose from the very beginning of being installed right here, in order to meet the hefty navigational and user experience demands that I have placed upon this site. Read on to find out how, and why, the upgrade in all its pain and glory was carried out.

The Summer of Code has finally come to an end, and it's time for me to write up my final thoughts on my involvement in it. The Import / Export API module has been a long and challenging project, but it's also been great fun and has, in my opinion, been a worthwhile cause to devote my time to. My mentor has given my work the final tick of approval (which is great!), and I personally feel that the project has been an overwhelming success.

In a small, poorly ventilated room, somewhere in Australia, there are four geeky fingers and two geeky thumbs, and they are attached to two geeky hands. All of the fingers and all of the thumbs are racing haphazardly across a black keyboard, trying to churn out PHP; but mostly they're just tapping repeatedly, and angrily, on the 'backspace' key. A pair of eyes squint tiredly at the LCD monitor before them, trying to discern whether the miniscule black dot that they perceive is a speck of dirt, or yet another pixel that has gone to pixel heaven.