Banging My Head Against Zen + Views Override in Drupal 5
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.
How Drupal is Changing My Life (and Business)
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.
I hack the hell out of Views Exposed Filters
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.
Drupal 6 + Panels + Site Contact Form? YES!
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:
<?php print contact_site_page(); ?>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:
<?php
require_once drupal_get_path('module', 'contact') .'/contact.pages.inc';
print drupal_get_form('contact_mail_page');
?>Hope it helps!
It's Best if You Don't See This
I don't think much of Mollom on my Drupal site. It's not that I don't like it, actaully I freakin' LOVE it! It is just that I never, ever, have to think about it.
Setting up pdftotext and search_files on a shared host (Bluehost)
So this week I had to get search_files module for Drupal 6 running on a shared host, Bluehost, for one of my customers. I had promised that we would be able to search his PDF files, but I didn't realize that search_files, as well as search_attachments modules require a Linux command line utility named pdftotext to be installed.
I did request that Bluehost install it on my box and was told that anything requiring root access wasn't going to happen.
Fine, maybe I can run it myself, after all, I did get SVN running on Bluehost, how hard could it be?
Wiki-Up that Drupal site
This morning, before our morning walk, and other family affairs, I poked around making Drupal my personal wiki. Why, that's probably what your asking? Drupal is a CMS, or CMS framework, and there are alternatives to Drupal for sure when it comes to wikis. PHPWiki, DokuWiki, MediaWiki, even the hosted PBWiki all come to mind.
