Here's a quick way to add recent tweets to your Drupal powered websites. The following code is as simple as possible. Add it to your site's module folder and enable the module. You they get a block to position on your site. The block is populated with your most recent tweets via a Javascript call to the Twitter website.

There are lots of modules for adding friend list, or buddy list functionality to your Drupal site. Some good, some bad, and some just plain ugly. I started using the BuddyList2 Drupal 6 port because I was using that for Drupal 5... but now I'm starting to favour Friendlist... read on to find out why...

My Active Tags module is now available on Drupal.org

http://drupal.org/project/active_tags

The Drupal 6.x release is at first release (v1) with the basic tag entry enhancement. Some extra features are in the development version. Also, due to popular demand, there is a backported version available for Drupal 5.x

Many things in Drupal are not obvious to non-techie (and even techie) users. One of the common sources of confusion can be the complex node content add and edit forms. One problem I've found in particular is using a tagging vocabulary and expecting users to format tags correctly and use commas to separate. Some users do and some don't which litters the site with long concatenated sets of tags.

Here's the first version of a module to make a nicer tag entry widget for Drupal vocabularies. This is somewhat inspired by Wordpress' tag entry system. This module is for Drupal 6 and provides a new option called "Active Tags" on the vocabulary edit page. If you select a vocabulary to be of the "Tag" type, and turn on Active Tags you will find a new widget for entering tags appears on the node edit page. Here's a before and after shot...

The Drupal for Developers event was great fun this week. I did a 15 min presentation on Programmatically Creating Drupal Nodes. The slides from this presentation will be going up on the Drupal UK site in the near future, but you can get a preview of the presentation below.

Here's a few bits of code from today's Drupal wranglings that solves a tricky UX problem with Drupal and CCK Node Reference fields.

Ever wanted to deal with the case that a user might want to reference a node that doesn't exist yet? Well I've played around with a couple of modules (Add n Reference and Add Node), but they didn't offer the clean user experience I needed. Here's an example use-case:

I couldn't get the available event content types or CCK to do what I wanted, so I've made a simple meeting module for Drupal that allows you to create a number of meeting templates with various roles, and then create meetings on specific dates, with users assigned to each of the roles.