development

Assignment: Create a highly customized page/node in Drupal and:

• Be able to develop the page/node using our text editor of choice and avoid the time-consuming and not-intended-to-be-developer friendly Drupal node-editing interface
• Optionally be able to decide whether to have the page/node be editable by the via the Drupal UI or not.

Sure, we could do this by creating a page-node-xx.tpl.php template file (where 'xx' is the node id number), but that's just a major hassle later on when updating/theming things and it won't give us the flexibility of being able to let an end-user edit things.

In this case, the thing to do is to create a file called my-file.php (.php because we want our text-editor to still recognize it correctly), put it in our theme folder, check the PHP input filter on the node itself, and then place this code in a node:

What this will do is look for the file you placed inside your theme folder called "my-file.php" and render it. Which means that you make changes directly to my-file.php without having to touch the node itself and thus simply refresh your node anytime you make changes to the file.

This method has the advantage of:

• Saving a ton of time and headaches of dealing with the Drupal interface and doing without your favorite code editing tool.
• After you're finished you'll have the option of choosing to replace the include-code with the final code inside your file so that an end-user can edit it within UI...
• ...or you can just keep things like this and be able to do cool things like check the code into version control, which means that you basically get many of the benefits of a tpl.php file without the cost of one.

Enjoy and happy coding. :-)

The Advanced Theme Construction Kit, which integrates a derivative of the Yahoo grids CSS library within a Drupal framework, was updated and released for Drupal 6 today.

I've been wanting to upgrade to MySQL 5 for a while now, and after hearing that MySQL 5 is required for Drupal 7 I decided to bump up my upgrade schedule, pronto. If all one wants is MySQL 5 then that is easy enough -- go download MAMP and you're done. But what if you want to be able to dev on MySQL 4 for projects that require it for whatever reason (e.g., clients who are run it and are not willing/able to upgrade MySQL at the moment)?

Well, with not a lot of effort - it very easy to have a PHP 5, PHP 4, MySQL 5, and MySQL 4.1 environment - all sharing the same doc root and servernames (e.g., urls):

I am pleased to announce the official release of the Advanced Theme Construction Kit (atck) (project page):

atck was developed in a production environment for purposes of quickly building css and xhtml valid Drupal themes from scratch without having to un-theme an existing Drupal theme to do it.

atck components include:

1. WYSIWYG grid builder
A browser-based grid builder which produces starter code for a page.tpl.php file. The grid builder itself was originially built by Christos Constandinou and it uses a modified version of Yahoo Grids which is more flexible and easier to customize. With Christos' permission (thanks, Christos!) it, and the supporting css, has been customized so that it works for Drupal themes and so that it is css3 valid. Access the builder online (FF only!), or download it and run it locally. [builder cannot be on Drupal.org because of MIT license]

2. style.css [separate download because of BSD license]
style.css contains only the css needed to support what the grid-builder outputs, as well as some general 'resets'. The only modifications one should need to make here would be if they want to make their layout a fixed width and/or a different width (default widths are in %).

3. page-layout.css and template.php
These files are where the visual styling of the site happens. The source of these files is from a combination of code from the Hunchbaque theme and some changes/additions which I added in order to provide baseline settings I prefer and/or provide more granular settings. The beauty of these files is the simplicty of them - they include as little markup/styling as possible to avoid complexity, while at the same time putting many helpful tools/comments at your finger tips so that you can accomplish what you want.

4. page.tpl.php
A sample page.tpl.file is included as a reference for finishing your own page.tpl.php file using code output from the grid builder. Note particularly the variable names for the blocks, regions, menus, etc. (at this point the builder does not include those items)

5. fix-ie-6.css and fix-ie-7.css
These files are included for purposes of providing IE-only css to each of the respective versions. By using conditional comments like this we keep the main css files hack-free and atck css3 valid.

Please keep in mind that this is an initial release - comments, contributions, etc welcome! (please file such things at the project issues queue though)

After spending 3 days trying to get Elipse PDT and the Zend debugger working on Mac OS X, my nerves were very frayed, indeed. Apparently, there has been an ongoing problem with the Zend debugger not stopping at breakpoints on Mac Intel machines...something that has plagued Eclipse through 3 different PHP extensions. (don't even get me started on how crazy it is that Eclipse has seen three completely separate PHP plugins within less than a year)