What's wrong with Mollom?

Submitted by rfay on

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So Mollom absolutely stinks, as far as I'm concerned.

I just posted this comment on a site that is not mine, but is a Drupal site running Mollom: http://www.istos.it/blog/drupal-training/open-sourcing-drupal-training:

The Examples for Developers project is an open-source training initiative. I'm trying to get it used for developer training and to have books on Drupal development use it for examples instead of rolling their own (which invariably get out-of-date and can't be maintained.)

I encourage you in this (vast) initiative.

And what did I get?

Your submission has triggered the spam filter and will not be accepted.

That's about the fourth time I've taken the time to write a comment on a Drupal Mollom-enabled site, and gotten that kind of a response. How many comments are being rejected inappropriately on sites that use Mollom? Who will ever know?

Eclipse Debugging with Zend Debugging Extension for PHP 5.3: New location for downloads

Submitted by rfay on

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New URL for Zend debugging plugin (now called Studio Web Debugger)

If you're a user of Eclipse with the Zend Debugging Extension and you've tried to use PHP 5.3, you may have noticed that the traditional download location doesn't have it.

The new location for downloading the Zend debugging extension is http://www.zend.com/products/studio/downloads. Get the "Studio Web Debugger" for your platform and architecture (requires registration). (Note that the old location for this was http://downloads.zend.com/pdt/server-debugger/, which is still referred to on many places on the web. This old location has libraries only up through PHP 5.2, but if that's all you need, will work fine.)

Basic debugging with Eclipse Galileo is covered in http://drupal.org/node/157609.

Form API Changes for Drupal 7, Part 1: $form_state changes

Submitted by rfay on

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You may know that lots of delicious things have happened to Drupal's Form API in Drupal 7. (Only a geek can say "delicious" and "Form API" in the same sentence. Try it!) The finest minds in the business have been working on it, I can assure you. Give effulgentsia, fago, frando, and chx a big hug when you see them, because Form API is much improved. (Sorry to those of you I forgot to name, but THANKS!)

I'm going to do a series covering Form API changes, starting with this one. I won't attempt to cover the deep details, just the things that ordinary developers might use:

  1. $form_state changes and form builder function signature changes
  2. AJAX Forms changes
  3. New properties (#attached and many friends)

Let me know if you have other topics to suggest.

OK, to business. This article is mostly parroted from the api.drupal.org topic: Form Generation. Thanks to Alex Bronstein (effulgentsia) for his reviews and contributions to that doc.

Don't forget that the form builder function signature changed!

In Drupal 6 the form builder function looked like this:

Translatable Regions Module: For user-contributed content in many languages

Submitted by rfay on

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Drupal is great at handling multilingual situations, but how do you make user-contributed content in multiple languages accessible to those who can't read them?

The Translatable Regions module tackles this by using the automated Google AJAX Language API via the jquery-translate plugin.

What do you have to do?

  • Install the module.
  • Decide what selectors you want to have translation buttons.
  • Configure the selectors at admin/settings/translatableregions.

Whenever those selectors appear on the page, a button is added offering to translate to many languages, the default being the browser language.

Here's an example of the use on user profiles on http://warmshowers.org.

New Queue and Menu Examples for Examples Project

Submitted by rfay on

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The Examples for Developers Project aims to provide high-quality, well-documented API examples for a broad range of Drupal core functionality. You can download the code from the project page, view it on api.drupal.org, or experience it (for several of them) at drupalexamples.info.

Recently, we've added two new example suites:

PHP 5.2 on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx (Seems to work for 12.04 too)

Submitted by rfay on

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Edit 2012-11-12: If you're interested in the newer problem of running PHP 5.3 on Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal, try this recipe.

Edit 2012-09-21: Isn't it about time you moved to PHP 5.3? Even though these instructions seem to work even for Ubuntu 12.04, it's really time for people to move on to PHP 5.3. If you're a Drupal user on Drupal 6, Drupal core and nearly all contrib are now just fine with 5.3.

Edit 2011-11-23: Since Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) is now out of support, the repositories to use for it have changed to old-releases.ubuntu.com. I've changed the karmic.list files attached. Please be aware that although 10.04LTS is still supported for years still, 9.10 is out of the support window, meaning that security issues in these packages will not be fixed.

Update: Look here to solve same problem with Ubuntu 10.10.

Lots of us are starting to run Drupal on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, and of course, Lucid comes with PHP 5.3, for which Drupal 6 is not yet ready.

Drupalcon: D7 Advanced Form API Session!

Submitted by rfay on

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Alex Bronstein, (effulgentsia) one of the maintainers of the Form API, will be doing an off-Broadway session on D7 Advanced Form API tomorrow (Wednesday) at 4:15pm in room 252. This is an exciting chance to catch up on all the great simplifications (and changes) in D7 FAPI.

Topics will be:

  • What's changed in D7 FAPI
  • The FAPI pipeline
  • Pipeline hooks and #properties
  • The essential $form_state keys (and the ones that are gone now)
  • AJAX Integration
  • And much, much more, of course

Check out the slides in advance

If you care about the Form API, BE THERE!

DrupalCon: Drupal 7 AJAX and Javascript

Submitted by rfay on

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Rob Loach, Kat Bailey and I will be presenting Drupal 7 AJAX and Javascript Monday, 3-4pm, in room 307.

Here are the basics:

  • The new AJAX Framework
  • AJAX forms, with a complete how-to and sample, easy to understand code.
  • The fantastic new #states feature for dynamic forms.
  • D7 Javascript changes from D6.
  • Using Javascript Libraries.

We've made great strides in Drupal 7. Come and hear about it.

If you used AHAH in D6, you're probably afraid of AJAX forms. But if you never used #ahah, you'll walk out of the room feeling competent to try out #ajax. You can't believe how easy it is now.

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