Darren Mothersele

I had a collection of database dumps from a server that had been created using MySQL's --all-databases option. This contained the databases for several Drupal websites, but I wanted to restore the Drupal database for just one of the sites. After a bit of Googling I came across two simple solutions:

Another great Drupal London event last night!

Chris (matason on Drupal.org) gave a great presentation of the new Drupal 7 Workbench module. It was great to see it in action and one I can see using myself a lot in the future. John and Rob demonstrated their Survey Builder module, a new backend for the excellent Form Builder tool. This looks like it has a lot of potential, so one to keep an eye on for the future I think. Vamory gave a really useful guide to making multi-step forms in FAPI, and then I got to talk about one of my pet favourite subjects, jQuery!

I showed the Active Tags module, and demonstrated adding some of the jQuery UI widgets to a Drupal 7 site, then showed how to build up a more complex interaction by adding Drag and Drop functionality to a couple of Drupal Views, then hooking up a Rules backend linked together by Page Manager. In case you missed it, or wanted more details, read on...

There are several approaches to integrating Drupal with Facebook, the most active modules being Facebook Connect and Drupal for Facebook. I've been playing around with a slightly different approach that interacts with the Graph API using the Feeds and Rules modules. Read on for more details...

Here are the slides from the presentation I gave last night at the Drupal Drop-in event at The Guardian in London:

The next Drupal Drop-in event has been announced on the London Drupal Community Eventbrite page. Register quickly, as places usually fill up quickly. I will be doing a demo of my Active Tags module and showing some advanced Views configuration with Taxonomy Views integration.

This Friday, 13th Aug, I will be presenting a case study at Drupal Focus on Publishers. If you are interested in hearing more about the use of Drupal in publishing then come along to this free event. I will be presenting a case study and talking about content aggregation, personalisation, and creating sites with premium subscriber-only content.

Now you can define Drupal blocks in your themes! With the Theme Blocks module I just submitted to drupal.org you can include blocks with your custom Drupal themes.

Sometimes you want a simple block for your Drupal site, and you have to create a module just to implement hook_block(). For simple blocks you end up creating the same code again and again for every site. Defining the template in hook_theme() then implementing hook_block() to make Drupal aware of your block. I have abstracted this process to make custom blocks as easy as adding a template file to your theme and a line to your theme.info file. See the project page on Drupal.org for more information.

There was no version of the markdown filter available for Drupal 7, and no existing issue on this in the issue queue at Drupal.org. I wasn't in an urgent need for this module, but I will need it on a project that is hoping to go D7 as soon as it is released, so I thought I'd use it as an excuse look further into the API changes in Drupal 7.

I'm working on the alpha2 release of Drupal7 and the D6 version of markdown checked out from CVS. I've posted the code up on drupal.org. Here's what needed to be done:

Working behind a firewall and need to get an up-to-date dev version of a Drupal module from the Drupal CVS? I was just stuck with this problem, but here's how I solved it.

Luckily, port 22 was open for ssh connection, so I tunnel the CVS traffic (port 2401) via my own server. Simple two step process:

The guys at Development Seed have released some awesome projects for Drupal. Just have a look at their Drupal projects page, wow! I've helped a few people get up and running with Open Atrium, and Managing News on Drupal, but I think their most important contribution to the Drupal ecosystem has been Features. Read on...