Drupal coder

I love Mollom. It keeps away practically all spam from my sites. If you have no idea yet what Mollom is, you definitely have to check it out.

But it really bugged me that there was no support yet for the Drupal webform module. That's a module I use on pretty much all of my sites to create contact forms and other.

So I decided to roll up my sleeves and add this feature myself.

Since the Drupal Mollom module isn't built with hooks (or any other modular system), I had to alter the Mollom module itself. This resulted in a patch which you can all download in the issue queue for the Mollom module.

Head over there to download the path and start your testing engines.

I've just launched my new portfolio website.

Go visit it at davyvandenbremt.be.

I need to take a break now.

Some really interesting posts are coming up!

Screenshot davyvandenbremt.be

Who said Drupal designs were uggly? Tons of great Drupal designs are available. And right now a place is available that bundles all these to prove the disbelievers wrong.

Visit drupalmuseum.com to visit the Drupal Museum.

I know there's a few other sites available, like drupalsites.net (which I like), or even Dries' blog. But Drupal Museum focusses on design. Which was something not available until now.

I really hope it will collect a lot of good sites. It will help Drupal developer draw non-believers over the line to convert their site to Drupal.

Let me also say that I'm proud to have one of my sites listen in "the museum": kristinascoop.be.

Screenshot kristinascoop.be

This is a follow up to the post "Creating a UTF-8 database to work with special characters".

When you want to move your database from one server/database to another one, you generally create a sql dump file from the source database using the mysqldump command and then do an import into the destination using the mysql source statement or via shell redirection (<).

This is just a heads up. When you make the connection on the destination server/database, specify the --default-character-set=utf8 option.

You end up with something like:

mysql -u user -ppassword --default-character-set=utf8 database < "dump.sql"

A few weeks ago, Dries Buytaert, together with Benjamin Schrauwen, two fellow (ex-) researchers at the University of Ghent (Universiteit Gent) founded Mollom. Mollom is a web service that helps you protecting your site from spam.

Mollom can be used on any website, but since Dries is also the founder of Drupal, you could expect a Drupal module would be offered soon. And so it is. A Joomla module is offered too.

This makes it very easy and fast to install Mollom on your Drupal website. I think it took me no more then 5 minutes.
You first register for a Mollom account where you can add your sites (yep, multiple) to your account. You then get a public and private api key. After you have installed the Mollom Drupal module, you just have to enter both keys, choose which forms to protect, and you're all set.

In the following graph you can see how many spam messages Mollom has blocked during its first week on this site.

Mollom usage graph

Let me finish by saying that Mollom is free during the beta period, but a fee might be charged (if you're using a very popular site) after the release.