I have been reading with interest the discussions at http://drupal.org/node/337079 and http://groups.drupal.org/node/15965 which both basically deal with the fact that Drupal has versions, and with each version comes a new set of changes both for procedural instructions and code samples, yet the Drupal Documentation can't handle changes in the same way.

So I came up with this idea. Let's continue the process of making a single page in the Handbooks for an idea, such as "Checking Code Out Of CVS", but then use jQuery to toggle hiding for all version-specific info of code snippets or explanations which don't pertain to your current Drupal version.  read more »

We just had an impromptu conversation over here about validating phone numbers that morphed into validating email addresses and more.

Adam brought up the fact there are a lot of email addresses that don’t pass the basic regex validation that a lot of sites use. In fact, there was a good discussion of this very issue on Slashdot in a larger article on regexes. One comment:  read more »

As most of you might know, Ubercart is chock full of AJAX, jQuery, and Special Sauce that both helps users along and also keeps them safe. One of those safety features is a nice little security check function which erases the credit card information on the Checkout Review page (cart/checkout/review) should a user's browser be refreshed. If a refresh occurs, the user gets redirected back to the cart/checkout page and must re-input their credit card information and then re-submit the form in order to get back to the Checkout Review page again.

This, as you might have guessed, is *really* not themer-friendly.  read more »

Komodo is a great cross-platform IDE. But I’ve noticed that as file size increases, Komodo’s performance slows to a crawl, becoming practically unusable once files hit 2.5k lines or so.

I opened a thread about it on ActiveState’s community site (which happens to be running Drupal!). It seems this is a known issue on OSX and they’re looking into it.  read more »

When users control the conversation, there is an interesting tendency for the elevation of users as experts based on contribution. If there is one thing I've learned about the Drupal community over the years, and in my years working around and in Open Source communities for years before that, it's this: contribution and presence are the basis of community capital; or, in short: contribution is social capital.  read more »

Yes, the San Diego Drupal User Group meeting is upon us yet again. This month, we’re meeting at Platt College on Wednesday night the 12th of November.

The topic of this meeting will be…Lightning talks! Unless Harry’s concocted another badass presentation that I don’t know about, we’ll be doing a round of lightning talks, followed by a group discussion of the topic that interested you most during the talks.  read more »

Deane Barker at Gadgetopia asked about how to access the content access APIs for different CMSs. He emailed me to find out if I might be able provide an example for Drupal.

If I get a list of content IDs, I should be able to “strain” them through some API call on the CMS, and get back a list of IDs the current user is allowed to see.

What if you could say —

Hey, CMS, I have this list of content IDs here… How did I get them? Yeah, well, that’s not that important right now…  read more »

It’s super annoying when you’re looking for a string in your code, so you do a recursive grep, only to get a ton of matches within svn’s “.svn” directories.

Here’s a solution:

Inside your ~/.bash_profile, insert this line:

alias rgrep="find . -follow ( -name ".svn" ) -prune -o -print | xargs grep -Hn"

Save it, then log out and back in.

Now instead of grep -ir "sprintf" *, do rgrep sprintf. Cake!

We’re not headed to DrupalCon DC until next March, but it’s already causing a lot of buzz around WorkHabit this week as we make plans, submit our talks, and watch and wait through the voting process.  read more »