developing | build2be/com/e

Internet Explorer blues

Submitted by clemens on Thu, 2008/03/20 - 9:49am

Just build a new theme with zen. It all went smooth. But being more a techy then a designer I only tested with FireFox, Gnome Web Browser (Gecko 1.8), Opera, Safari and forgot IE 6 which I have through ie4linux. Guess what ... it broke with IE 6.

Yes I know ... IE is out there for real so you better test. But it is a drag for sure. The designer uses IE 7 where it looks ok. So maybe in the near future we are saved a drag or two :-)

- IE is out there: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

developing

zen

Goal Groups

Submitted by clemens on Fri, 2008/03/14 - 5:32pm

What are Goal Groups?

I did not know this term. But it makes sense to group your site visitors.

Some pointers:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/3761#comment-18895

http://expressionengine.com/

developing

Building a my groups block

Submitted by clemens on Tue, 2008/03/11 - 10:44am

How does one build a 'my groups' block? I thought it would be an out of the box thingy. But it is not. On the channel the answer was DIY. So this is what I build. The code patterns below are the same. The use cases differently.

Show my groups
Add special node type immediately to a group. This is for speed
Generate a node and redirect elsewhere. This is for speed and timeing usage.

My Groups

This is just looping through the group ids of the current user.

project dependency management

Submitted by clemens on Mon, 2008/03/03 - 10:59am

This is a tricky part of package management. I have no ready solution apart from 'have a look at debian packagemanagement'.

For installation the dependencies attribute of a module should contain a version expression. In example dependencies: token (<= 1.4)

developing

project provides

Submitted by clemens on Mon, 2008/03/03 - 10:16am

It would be neat to have a listing of all projects providing their modules. This would solve the problem with ie google_analytics project providing the googleanalytics.module.

In example the new file with extension proj google_analytics.proj would contains

provides = googleanalytics

and annotate.proj

provides = annotate, annotate_ed, annotate_bl

On the modules page this would show up as is views_ui missing (provided by views)

developing

infra

module dependency management

Submitted by clemens on Mon, 2008/03/03 - 9:55am

I don't like the idea that dependencies are not handled in a unified way. By that I mean that both module.inc and update.php code is written to handle module status. There should be a central library handling their dependencies. When we handle this in a unified way installing a big project like ubercart is easy.

When installing/enabling a module it is important to know what this module is dependent of. Ie uc_cart is dependent of uc_order. See ie http://build2be.com/sites/build2be.com/files/ubercart.neato.png

Module management in Drupal

Submitted by clemens on Mon, 2008/03/03 - 9:19am

The title of this page should be project management because Drupal uses projects for delivering modules. A companion video shows the Drupal 5.x situation. Using drush, my drush_mm patch and update status to manage and install modules command line. This video shows better dependency checking than currently available in D7. As I hope is clear I want to contribute to implement this into D7.

graphviz or hypergraph

Submitted by clemens on Mon, 2008/02/25 - 2:16pm

When making these images about modules i use graphviz to render them. But just ran into http://drupal.org/project/hypergraph which looks great. So I have to study this one! Commands to render a .dot file are ie with non overlapping nodes

neato -Goverlap=false -o my.neato.png -T png my.dot

or for a top down graph.

dot -T png -o my.dot.png my.dot

The attached image is an installation with the jstools, cck, views, drush, og in order to get faster user experiences. View the full image

Questions, Quizes and Answers

Submitted by clemens on Mon, 2008/02/25 - 2:13pm

For interviewing or interogating people it is nice to have a prepared list of questions. What module to use?

I know of these modules.
- http://drupal.org/project/answer
- http://drupal.org/project/quiz
- http://drupal.org/project/webform

In search of modules for faster user experience

Submitted by clemens on Mon, 2008/02/25 - 2:00pm

What modules does one need to get faster user experience? This probably leads to using ajax.

One of my thought is some node/%/edit's one one page. Preferably on tabs too!

Just browsing the categories http://drupal.org/project/Modules/category/101 (javascript utilities) and content at http://drupal.org is still overwhelming.

Here is a listing with just some modules.
- http://drupal.org/project/ajaxtable
- http://drupal.org/project/autosave
- http://drupal.org/project/block_refresh
- http://drupal.org/project/compact_forms
- http://drupal.org/project/cck_fieldgroup_tabs