Articles

I discovered a little issue recently with the Profile module in Drupal 6 and after finding the solution I thought I would post it here in case it helps anyone else.

The problem occurs when using the list selection form item in a specific way. This form item works find for just about every situation, except one special case. Lets assume that you wanted to ask a user a question which requires a number between zero and four; you enter the following into the selection options box.

0
1
2
3
4

This is saved fine, but when the form is rendered it doesn't actually print out the option to select 0, which is odd as the value is definitely saved in the database and can be reedited in the form admin.

Sunday

Due to the crappy train service from my home town I had to drive into Manchester on Sunday, but made it in good time to have a coffee before we went to vote on the talks. Some people had a heavy night drinking the night before and therefore didn't make it in the morning (or at all). Some has also opted to only attend the Saturday and so there were a few faces missing, but there were still plenty of people there.

This weekend saw the PHP Unconference Europe 2011 event in Manchester. The organisers were hoping that the rain would hold off for the weekend, and being true to form Manchester was wet and cold. Being an unconference the talks and discussions are mainly casual and dependent on what everyone decided to see on the day. The event ran across Saturday and Sunday with different talks on each day.

The Drupal Features module is a way of packaging site components with the ultimate aim of easing migration. For example, an events section in Drupal doesn't just contain a node type called events, it also contains all of the configuration settings around comments, fields added to the node type, permissions available to users, menu items created and any views used to aggregate or search the events. Features can integrate module dependencies so that all functionality that has been packaged along with the feature is available on the other system.

The main thing to realize about Features is that they are not meant to transport content, just blocks of functionality. The idea is that if you create a "blog" feature then you can package that and deploy it to multiple sites.

Connecting to a MySQL database in PHP is usually not a difficult thing to do, in fact it is one of the first things that many tutorials will go though. However, there are certain curcumstances that require more information than the standard host, password and username details. A good example of this is when connecting to a local MySQL server through a different (or at least non standard) socket. The normal place for the MySQL socket to be on a Linux install is /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock, but some hosts might change this.

iFrames can be a convenient way of loading content from one domain onto another, but they do have their limitations. For example, it usually isn't possible to style the contents of the iFrame and you are therefore left at the mercy of a third party site. They also look pretty shonky if the third party site does down for whatever reason. Displaying large "page not found" statements on your page is quite unsightly.

There is a function in jQuery called load() that will use an AJAX request to load content from page onto another, and can even extract specific areas of the page and return only those parts. I thought I would run through some examples and then show how it is possible to display content from another domain on a page. Lets say we have a PHP file on the server that generates a random number, this would be the following very simple code.

This function might be of limited use, but it can create some neat effects in your titles. It works by splitting a string into little bits using the spaces and then puts it back together again into two sections. The first section will be normal, but the second section will be wrapped in a span element. By using this function you can create an interesting effects in your titles by styling the first half differently from the second.

Use the following array if you want to get a list of countries, along with their codes. These codes are the 2 letter ISO code, the 3 letter UN code and the 3 number UN code. I had to build this the other day in order to present a list of countries in a form so I post it here in case I need something like it again.

A common practice when creating sites in Drupal is to create different node types for different purposes. Sometimes these node types can be functionality based rather than content based and are used for creating a rotating banner or something similar. A side effect of this is that you will then see these nodes appearing in search results, which can cause some confusing results to be displayed.

So how do you remove these nodes? Well with quite a simple little module you can intercept the search query and stop certain node types being searched for. Adding a couple of extra functions means that we can add form controls to the advanced search form and the search admin area so that nodes can be selected to be excluded from the search results.

I was testing a string manipulation function today (which I will post some other time) and I wanted to create a random string of characters that I could feed into it, so I came up with the function below. I thought it was a neat use of the rand() and chr() PHP functions, so here it is.