Drupal

Finally I am back blogging after half an year. Its been some good time since my last blog entry, but here I am and let's get down to business without much fanfare :)

I just fixed a configuration issue on a production site built with Drupal 7, what I would rather call a design bug with Blog module in D7.

We had last month delivered a D7 based site to a client, with ability for various authorized users to create and maintain their blogs on the site using Drupal's native Blog module. And in the morning today, I received an email from the client stating that one of the user's had created 3 blog entries and everything works fine, except that when we visit the user's individual blog page at:
http://example.com/blog/uid

In the latest 7.x version of my Take Control module for Drupal released a couple of weeks before, I added the ability to specify per role and per user base path for File Browser access. Additionally Tokens were allowed to be present in base path for file browser for additional flexibility.

So it happened last week that I created a View in Drupal 7 and I wanted to customize conditions (aka Filters) in a way that I thought cannot be done with the Views interface (I later discovered I was wrong and D7 Views UI could have been used to express the filters in the way I needed).

It has been the first time since I started blogging somewhere in 2009 that a full calendar month (of April 2012) passed without me writing any blog in that month. It feels good to be back to the blogging world.

This week I delievered the first phase of a VOIP based Drupal site to a medical industry client using the VoipDrupal suite of modules. Let me first take this opportunity to acknowledge the great work Leo Burd and his team at MIT Center have done in developing an excellent and comprehensive set of modules revolving around providing VOIP support in Drupal, I never thought I could do a Drupal VOIP project in such less time until I did it using the mentioned suite of modules.

In my recent Drupal work last week, I needed to add custom operations to the Users list administration page accessible at "admin/user/user" on a Drupal 6 site (

PayPal integration is such a common requirement for e-commerce sites, irrespective of the platform the site is built with, right. So recently a client approached me for integrating PayPal payments into their Drupal site, and my immediate question to them was why are they asking me to invent the wheel again. There sure are many PayPal integration modules available on drupal.org, and why don't they use one of them.

This was the most time consuming aspect for the recent port of my Document module for Drupal 7.

You would be knowing that File system API underwent a complete revamp in Drupal 7 (see this and this link, a very good introduction of the changes and new concepts is available on Randy Fay's blog). In Drupal 6, handling file uploads was this easy:

While working on the 7.x port for my Document module for Drupal day before yesterday, I had a pretty anxious moment. As you would know, the new DBTNG database abstraction layer in Drupal 7 fundamentally changes the way your module code interacts with the db. Now instead of writing raw Sql queries, you use a set of high level objects to specify the various components of your query using a series of methods which is then translated to Sql by the DBTNG layer and executed against the database. Sample this for example: