dkurtz's blog

BDUG March Meetup: Review

dkurtz — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:16:52 +0000

The Berkeley Drupal User Group's March meeting was a week and a half ago, but I'm still thinking about it, and now, in the "better late than never" spirit, I'm writing about it.

Dependency Browser Module - Enabling your Drupal Fix

dkurtz — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:14:25 +0000

Whenever I need to implement a custom feature for a Drupal site, I always check the Drupal.org module repository to see if someone has already written a module that does the same thing. This can be difficult, since the number of modules has exploded in recent years and the infrastructure for browsing them has not caught up (though the redesign project has noticed this and is discussing some great improvements). But that might be a ways away so in the mean time I've whipped together one new way of browsing modules with this nifty little Module Dependency Browser for Drupal.

Debugging Drupal with MacGDBp

dkurtz — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:45:51 +0000

Confession time. I don't use an IDE (Integrated Development Enviroment) for Drupal development. Sometimes, I kind of wish I did because having all of the development tools in one place is great; but all of the IDEs I've tried for my platform (I'm a OS X user) try to change the way I work, lack key PHP features, or are incredibly slow. And I really like TextMate. Thankfully I've found a great PHP debugger for OS X called MacGDBp and, at least for me, the chances of switching to an IDE continue to dwindle.

Keeping Up with the Joneses: Activity Aggregation in Drupal

dkurtz — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:13:07 +0000

Facebook's newsfeed feature introduced social network users to continuous updates of news about the goings-on in the lives of their friends and contacts. Activity aggregators have turned out to be a pretty useful feature for social networking sites, and can even be a little addictive when done right. Most sites that bill themselves as a social or professional network now have some kind of newsfeed, friend feed, lifestream or other feed.

Teleport 1.0 Released

dkurtz — Sat, 17 May 2008 05:32:04 +0000

I've just released version 1.0 of the Teleport module. Teleport is "QuickSilver for Drupal", but if you don't know what QuickSilver is, that's not going to tell you much. Basically, Teleport lets you quickly jump to a page on your Drupal site by typing in part of the path or the title. It saves me a ton of time when jumping around to administration pages that are nested two or three levels deep. See an example in the screencast.

Since the beta release, I've fixed a few bugs and added the ability to search path aliases. I thought that searching paths was important enough that it had to be included in a 1.0 release.

DrupalCampToronto 2008 Is On!

dkurtz — Thu, 15 May 2008 08:46:00 +0000

Trellon is one of the sponsors of the third annual DrupalCamp Toronto, which will take place on May 23rd and May 24th at the Faculty of Information Studies on the University of Toronto campus (map).

Super-flexible forms in Drupal 5

dkurtz — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:14:59 +0000

It's common practice for theme function writers to give every div a class, so that it can be targetted by CSS. For us, this is especially important in forms, since our clients often ask us to lay out forms in complicated ways.

This was a problem in Drupal 5 (and earlier). Although form elements had ids, so specific elements could be accessed from Javascript and CSS, they are all encased in wrapper divs with class "form-item". This means there's no easy way to lay out a specific form item.