Adding Understanding

Off to a great start at Drupal Camp PDX. Ben Kaplan and Andrew Morton are kicking off the day with what Drupal is and is not. Some great analogs are being used to illustrate what Drupal is and is not. Of course having a Drupal Camp in the beautiful Portland area makes it all the better.  Read more »

Working on the Forum Thread module I came across a bit of a challenge. On one user's site the call to add an inline javascript file (drupal_add_js()) was being called from nodeapi twice. Since it is calling inline javascript drupal_add_js happily puts the script on the page twice.

In this case the script in question calls a "toggle" function to hide and show the comments on a given forum node. Since the script was there twice it obediently displayed and then immediately hid the comment body. Evidently users aren't keen on this method of speed-reading.

The solution then is simple. Use an external .js file. However, in this case to make the module easy to configure I wanted to allow users the choice of which css element identifies a "comment title". (An aside that the way this works is to hide and show the siblings of the title which does impose some requirements about how the comment is formatted.) So this makes it more complex because I want to include the proper selector in the script and still include it in a file.

To accomplish this I ended up splitting the jQuery function into a couple of separate calls. The first, an inline script, does an addClass to the user-identified comment title class. Then a file-based javascript acts on the newly added class to hide and show the comments as a website user chooses on each page.

It is possible to see the results in action.

Being the first Thursday of the month the Boise Drupal User Group meeting at the Eagle Public Library. We took a look at several cool projects members of the group are working on. Included among them are these great Drupal modules:

• Mark it up
• SuperNav
• Many cool projects that folks are working on but not ready to have the traffic yet

Having a thriving local Drupal User group is great. Now off to start on getting the pancakes ready for Saturday's pancake breakfast.

author: David Mercer asin: 1847192971 binding: Paperback list price: $44.99 USD amazon price: $44.99 USD

This book updates the bestselling Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites for Drupal 6, the latest, much improved version of this popular open-source Content Management System. Targeting readers with little experience in website design, unfamiliar with PHP, MySQL or HTML, and with little to no experience of Drupal, it looks pragmatically at the steps needed from knowing you want a website right through to designing and building it like a pro, and then successfully managing and maintaining it. Experienced author David Mercer uses a friendly, engaging style that is clear and concise, allowing readers to advance rapidly until they can tackle any problem with confidence. Drupal is an elegantly designed, well-supported and flexible open-source CMS platform that empowers anyone to create a website or blog and is rapidly becoming first choice of people in the know. With this powerful tool you need not pay professionals to design a site; you can do the job yourself.

In a little Drupal surfing while waiting for the latest Lullabot podcast this morning I came across the recent University of Colorado website. It's great to see another university using Drupal and they are doing it in a big way.

Had this ad been posted on April 1st it would have been a really funny joke. Posted late in the month it is more funny sad than funny ha ha. Sadly this is not made up but a real ad posted by a real law school. This could turn into the right opportunity for someone with a solid Drupal developer. Unfortunately for the law school in question it does not bode well.

As is the case in many shops this will be a one-person web shop. By itself this is not a bad deal. The challenge will be getting a good person. Unfortunately the advertisement suggests the organization understands very little about what to expect from this position. What is best about this advertisement is the line "[K]nowledge of a web programming language is required (ColdFusion or Dreamweaver)." Sigh. If the school is really lucky they'll get a good Drupaler to apply and come explain in easy to understand terms what the school needs.

Senior Web Developer - Law School

This position will design, test, and implement websites, including designing databases, web-interfaces, and reports for the Law School. While the Director will be kept abreast of all activities (for purpose of approval, particularly informational and/or content issues) related to Web resources, most of the technological and operational aspects of the sites will be the full responsibility of this position.

Requirements: Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Information Systems, Computer Science, Computer Engineering or a closely  Read more »

Drupal founder and Acquia co-founder Dries Buytaert was named a most promising entrepreneur by Business Week magazine in their special report. Congratulations Dries on an honor well deserved.