Drupal coder

Review : Drupal 6 - Social Networking

drupal-6-social-networking.jpgA lot of Drupal books have come out lately. A ... lot. One that I've seen lately is called Drupal 6 - Social Networking and is actually pretty good. It is published by Packt Publishing and written by Michael Peacock. The goal of the book is to provide users who want to build their own social network (think Twitter, Facebook, ...) a step by step guide.

The book starts by explaining what a Social Network is and what it can do for you and your company. It goes then further by installing and configuring Drupal. It provides a nice walk through the most used configuration screen. After following that by introducing you to nodes, blocks, menus, themes and modules you get a nice overview of how Drupal is built up.

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August 30, 2009 — books, Drupal, reviews

New module released for advanced integration for Campaign Monitor in Drupal

Thanks to the the sponsorship of Drupal integrator Calibrate, I've just released a new Drupal module that integrates your Drupal site with your Campaign Monitor account.

Campaign Monitor is a fully rebrandable online mailing list tool, and by adding this module you can integrate the users of your Drupal site with your Campaign Monitor subscriber lists, in a quite advanced way. This module includes features like:

  • Support for multiple lists.
  • Automatic fetching of lists and fields from your Campaign Monitor account.
  • Asynchronous pushing of subscription and unsubscription requests to make it fast and reliable to keep things synced.
  • Match Campaign Monitor custom fields to Drupal tokens, profile fields and PHP code.

Visit the Drupal site to grab the Campaign Monitor Advanced module. If you don't need that level of integration, you can use the simpler existing Campaign Monitor module, which is still available.

campaign-monitor.png

August 25, 2009 — Campaign Monitor, Drupal, modules

Automatically find related content on other sites using Service Attachments

I just contributed a new Drupal module called Service Attachments. It basically finds related content for nodes on others sites like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, ... It's actually implemented as a small "framework" so you can plugin in your own services.

When do you need this? Well, when you want to enrich your nodes with content from other sites and you don't want to go through the process of searching all those sites.

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August 16, 2009 — Drupal, modules, Service Attachments

Must have and popular Drupal modules

I've seen a lot of top 10 (20) listings of favourite Drupal modules appear on the net lately. So I couldn't be left behind.

Below you'll find a listing of my "must have" modules that I install on pretty much every website (if needed of course). Even more below you'll find a few links to popular modules: modules that are popular in the community.

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May 13, 2009 — Drupal

PHP filter and search index woes

PHP filter is a great filter. It gives you a lot of flexibility. But it has a lot of disadvantages too. One of them is that it makes your code harder to debug.

One of those hard debug sessions occurred lately when the following happened. Cron always stopped running when it was going to index this one node. It also redirected to some page. Weird.

What was happening? The node was a page. The body was having the PHP filter on and the following code was in that body:

<?php drupal_goto("node/add/story"); ?>

What does this have to do with search indexing you ask? Well, when the search indexer is going to index a node, it first runs all filters on your body, and it's the result of that that is getting indexed. So if you're writing PHP code, that code is run when the indexer comes along. Even "non-text generating" code, like the redirect in this case.

April 23, 2009 — Drupal, input formats, search

drupalcoder.com is a blog on all things Drupal in specific and LAMP on OS X in general. It is maintained by Davy Van Den Bremt, a Belgian (Drupal) web developer and designer living in Ghent. The goal of this blog is to log all interesting things that have crossed the writer's path while developing Drupal sites. You can read all about Davy's professional activities on his LinkedIn profile. If you want to get in touch, use the contact form.