Patrick Teglia

In many instances, I have seen drag and drop (dnd) ordering, rearranging, what have you, used where it perhaps didn't really need to be, but sometimes, there is a real good use for it. I ran into that today.

So lately I have been having all kinds of issues forgetting to do a git pull before doing a git push.

Ok, there are a couple of things in Drupal that I pound my head against on a regular basis, and overriding CCK fields using hook_form_alter in a custom module is one of them. You write the code, but you don't see any changes. Weird? Oh yeah.
Come to find out from this excellent blog post that I wasn't the only one to experience this. It stems from the module weight of your module as compared to CCK. The fix is to write a simple .install file for your module and set the weight:

If that title doesn't get your attention, you aren't a geek, srsly.

After hearing a little interest from some people around irc-land, and from one person who I am considering starting a G1-fund for, I decided that I should try to get Drupal 7 working on my T-Mobile G1 phone. After all, it's an Open phone, right? I might have even uttered those words my wife and I always regret; "How hard can it be?"

Actually, it wasn't that hard :)

Recently I found the Plugin Manager module (http://drupal.org/project/plugin_manager) and thought that it sounded wickedly cool, especially because it can allow you to install modules at the click of a button, and run upgrades directly from the admin, fetching all files directly from Drupal's servers. Getting it setup however is another beast altogether, and one that I figured I should document if the need arose to do it again.

My setup is on Slicehost with an Ubuntu server install, where I have root access and can manipulate my server configuration any way I see fit. If you do not have a similar arrangement, I am not sure how you might go about using SSH with this module. Here is how I did it.

In case anyone wants to know how to create a pre-roll video that plays before ALL local video content, here is how you might go about it. First, you will want to have the following modules:

• http://drupal.org/project/media_mover
• http://drupal.org/project/xspf_playlist
• http://drupal.org/project/flvmediaplayer
• http://drupal.org/project/trackit - Optional if you want to track your impressions

After you have that setup, and have gotten your video content type all straightened out, and you have the settings for all of these items correct, then you need to add a little something to your very own custom module to enable the pre-roll video to load before all of the videos. In it you might add the following code:

Here is a little gotcha about overriding a View in a block on a Zen sub-theme in Drupal 5 that I thought I should write down, and perhaps share.

I am working on a Drupal 5 site, and I am using Views. I NEED to override how a Views generated block is themed, and because blocks only have access to the $content string, and I need to access a node variable, I needed to override the view and send my node information to it.

A tiny bit of history...

Four years ago, a very cool musician/web guy asked me to help him do some CSS work for another musician's site he was developing, on a platform called Drupal. I didn't know Drupal very well, but I had played with it, and knew CSS, so I said Sure! The site was cool, and I recall that I was editing all kinds of CSS files in all these different places (where I shouldn't have). It all seemed very complicated with these modules having their own style sheets. I was intrigued! But I was also confused by the taxonomy, and felt it was too complicated for the little sites I was doing at the time. After that project, I returned to doing things the way I had been doing them.

It is really too bad I didn't see the real beauty of Drupal at that time, that I didn't understand it's power, flexibility, and community. They were all there four years ago, but I didn't see them. If I had, who knows what I would be doing now? I might have been smitten by the drop, like that cool musician, Robert Douglass. That was his first Drupal site as well.

Warning: Wear your peril sensitive code goggles before viewing this post. My code is probably inappropriate for young audiences, the elderly, people with heart conditions, or overly sensitive coders who know the right way to do it.

For those of you who are trying to figure out how to place a contact form into a panels layout in Drupal 6.4+, I have found that the old method of:

was only producing a white screen of death. What DID work for placing a site contact form in both Panels and Lightbox2 was to use the PHP filter, and use the following:

Hope it helps!