This site contains some of my own Drupal reference material and resources.

Some code projects are published here because I feel it is not stable or secure or useful enough to be released as a stand-alone project on Drupal.org, or because it's just a proof-of-concept, test or incubation, or because I don't really want to have to support it yet. Some code here will end up on drupal.org along with my others, just maybe not yet. Much of the code discussed here is available for checkout or inspection inspection directly from CVS.

Book page

Drupal Best Practices - for corporate site development

Drupal is set up to maintain community-based sites out of the box, with comments, blogs, forums, and multiple users and roles integrated as part of core.
However it's also a very strong platform for centralized, traditional Content Management and a full web development platform, from a brochureware 'about us' site presence to full ecommerce site or knowlegebase.

This handbook focuses directly on the latter cases, with lessons learned from private, corporate and government sites.

Story

HOWTO grab a list of all enabled *packages* (not modules) from a live Drupal site

Posted March 20th, 2012 by dman

drush pm-list
is pretty handy, but it disn't identify the modules within bundled projects usefully enough for me.
To extract a list of the things I needed to download in order to build a quick makefile, I came up with :

echo SELECT filename, name, status FROM system WHERE status = 1 AND type = 'module';" | drush sql-cli | awk -F '/' '{print $5}' | uniq

The package names are 5th in the path as all my deployed stuff is in sites/all/modules/contrib/packagename or sites/all/modules/patched/packagename, sites/all/modules/custom/packagename

Story

Getting started with git

Posted November 18th, 2010 by dman
more:

These are just notes so I can find them again next time, I know I'm missing a few concepts still, but I need to keep track of what has so far worked for me.

  1. Set up a git repository and daemon

    Git and its super-localized repositories are all very well, but hardly useful for sharing, so I need an offshore git repo where my work really lives when I'm between machines. So I set up my own git repository. Following a fer online instructions, I got my rackhost machine to do this for me.
    So now I can do things like

Project

Imagecache Server

Posted October 11th, 2009 by dman
more:
Imagecache server - diagram of the request process

The Drupal ImageCache module provides a Drupal callback URL that takes a preset name and a local filepath as arguments. It puts the two together and returns a result.

imagecache_server.module does a similar thing for any URL on the web

It provides a callback URL (or an RPC endpoint if you like the jargon) that allows certain clients to request that the ImageCache process be applied to any image with an URL.

Project

Advanced Form

Posted April 22nd, 2008 by dman
more:

User interface modification.
Hides some normal (or additional) for elements from the normal node edit screen, with an 'advanced' toggle button that can reveal them again.
Useful for simplifying the editing process, without actually using rights management.
Works client-side, by just hiding some things with css and javascript. NOT a security feature.

Project

Paystation

Posted March 17th, 2008 by dman
more:

Payment module for paystation.co.nz payment gateway and Drupal ecommerce.

Payment Module : Paystation
Original Author : Dan Morrison
Largely based on the Paypal module by Matt Westgate
Settings : > administer > store > settings > paystation

********************************************************************
DESCRIPTION:

Accept payments using Paystation. Paystation is a transaction gateway
used by New Zealand Banks. http://paystation.co.nz/
This module implements the Three Party Interface API - whereby the

Book page

Uploading files

There are several issues that may make uploading large files difficult from slow connections.

All servers have upper limits of size and speed for uploading. Some of these can be over-ridden, but this depends on the amount of control you have over the server machine. 

Book page

Site Editor quickstart (inc ecommerce)

There are many different options and settings within the site. Much more documentation and help can be found online in the Drupal Site Guide so this guide will cover the settings that are specific to this website.

Book page

Video sizes for upload and playback

When uploading files for playback on the web, you always have to find some compromise between quality and reasonable download speed. Simply, the bigger and better the file you want, the longer most users will have to wait just to see it. YouTube has found their sweet spot for web users, but does so by squashing image quality to the bare minimum. If you want original video uploads to look better than YouTube, you can choose to do so, but you still have to find the right compromise.

Book page

Drupal handbook/userguide

Collected here is some edited versions of the documentation pages I prepared for clients of several sites. Introduction to Drupal and HOWTOs. Because It's a bit intimidating to throw the whole Drupal handbook at them when we've already done most of the development/setup and we just need some end-user docs for the maintainers and editors.

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