Drupal

Well, it feels good to be blogging after a while. The past few weeks have been really hectic. Did you notice I do not have a single blog post for this month before this post? Well, I intend to compensate the void now, and what better way to begin than to offer some useful downloads for the community.

I have been getting a lot of Drupal consulting proposals for sometime. I will discuss these together with my schedule for the past days in a chit-chat entry, but let's concentrate on the topic on hand.

I recently needed to create a table in Drupal (while working on my next Drupal open source module, Document). It's just too easy outputting a table in PHP using a simple for loop over data fetched from the db. However, I wanted the table to look exactly like a native Drupal table, with sticky headers, ability to sort selected columns, paging etc.

While working on my next open-source module, Document for Drupal, I had a peculiar situation trying to create sub-directories under Drupal's files directory (usually located at /sites/default/files).

The module allows users to upload files to Drupal, and the admin interface of the module has a setting to allow administrators to specify the sub-directory under the files directory where the uploaded files should be saved to.

Document is a complete Document Management System for the Drupal CMS. I am still working on some parts of the module and hopefully, its first release should be available soon.

The official page for the module on drupal.org is this:
http://drupal.org/project/document

After recommendation by my brother to try MediaTemple as a Hosting Provider, I moved one of my client websites (based on WordPress) to MediaTemple last month.

My initial view of the service was reasonably satisfied, except for I would have liked a more functional Hosting Panel, especially related to backing-up & restoring databases (instead of having to do it each time manually via SSH, maybe I have been spoiled by CPanel).

I have been pretty surprised seeing the rising number of hacking attempts against this website. A larger number of these attempts have targeted a well-known vulnerability in FlashChat, a popular chat room for PHP/MySql installations.

It began initially with a lot of "404 Page Not Found" errors in my site log. Initially, I ignored them, but when I saw many of these errors for a common script, named aedating4CMS.php, and knowing that my site never had such a script, I decided to research this further.

While working on the next release of my open-source Drupal module Reference Links, I needed to delete all votes for links attached to a node when the node itself was being deleted. Here, remember the votes were stored for the links attached to the nodes (and not the nodes themselves).

"Reference Links" allows custom Urls to be attached to nodes. Its use is seen basically for documentation pages on a site.

I faced this the first time, when I was working on the File Browser add-on for the 2.x branch of my Take Control module for Drupal. Drupal's core CSS is significantly incompatible with the ExtJs' CSS, and considerably disorients the layout of widgets like MessageBox, Toolbars, or even GridPanel.

I initially used FamFam Silk Icons for the File Browser, but had to later switch to GPL licensed icons due to incompatibility of Fam Fam Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license with Drupal's requirement of GPL 2 license.