Drupal 6.x

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.

While editing content on a client site last week, I got a rather confusing error in Google Chrome Developer tools:

Refused to execute a JavaScript script. Source code of script found within request.

I was incorporating Google Maps on a page through a Block and the block content had some javascript code in it. But on saving the block, two issues surfaced: 1) I got the above error in Chrome Dev tools console and 2) The Map did not show up on the page.

Let me clarify staright away that the code below has been tested successfully against Drupal 6 only. But I believe it should work with Drupal 7 also with minor changes (if any required). Okay now, let's come to the point.

Last week, I was trying to add a custom validation method for node form of a particular content type in Drupal. My initial approach was as naive as specifying my custom validation method in hook_form_alter, something like the following:

function mymodule_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id) {
	switch($form_id) {
		case 'artist_node_form':
$form['#validate'][] = '_mymodule_custom validation';
			break;
	}
}

I needed to remove the default "-None-"/"-Select-" option that Drupal's Form API adds to "select" form elements. Let's take an example. Consider the following "select" element definition for a form:

$element = array (
			'#type' => 'select',
			'#options' => array (
							1 => 'Very poor',
							2 => 'Not that bad',
							3 => 'Average',
							4 => 'Good',
							5 => 'Perfect',
						),
			'#required' => TRUE,
			'#title' => 'Rating',
		);

After my last blog post on Drupal, expect some more Drupal related blog posts related to my recent work that I have been doing in Drupal.

You might be knowing that the jquery_ui contributed module is the preferred way to use jQuery UI in Drupal. This module provides the jqeury_ui_add method with which you can include any jQuery UI widget on the page. The module ensures that any widget's dependencies are also loaded automatically and that multiple modules wanting to include the same widget do not conflict by including the widget script files twice.

My 100th blog post, and I was thinking on the topic to choose for this blog post. I had multiple in my mind, but then decided to go back to where it all started, Drupal. My first real blog entry on this site related to my Take Control module for 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.