Drupal

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:

Drupal 7 brings some important API changes and enhancements to the table, one of them being the ability to control precisely the order of execution of a particular hook between modules.

I was asked by a client last week if it is possible to control execution of specific hooks between modules. Here is the (very precisely) framed question:

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.

I am excited to announce that I am now an "Individual Member" of the "Drupal Association". Its been really sometime since I have been working with Drupal now and the journey has been satisfying (and challenging) to say the least.

My recent blog post on Creating Paged and Sorted tables in Drupal 7 got a comment today asking if it was possible to implement Paging and Sorting in Drupal tables via Ajax, instead of regular Page refreshes that Drupal does by default.

My earlier blog post on creating Drupal 6 tables (I mean html tables and not database tables) complete with paging, sorting, sticky headers and other Drupal table features attracts a decent number of visitors (Analytics tell me). So, I thought of publishing another post with the same theme but this time for Drupal 7, as there are significant changes on how you would create Html tables with Drupal 7 with all the features.