Starbow Consulting

I have recently updated two of my favorite modules.

With some prodding and sponsorship from Initiatives of Change (www.iofc.org), I ported Private Upload to Drupal 6. It turns out there is even more need for this module in D6 than there was in Drupal 5, as D6 out-of-the box offers almost no protection for private files.

I had a little free time today, so I took a look at the new SimpleTest integration for Drupal 7. The SimpleTest framework now comes as a core module, which is a fantastic choice for growing a testing culture. I have only been keeping half-an-eye on the evolution of the testing framework, but I get the impression it bears only a passing resemblance to the original SimpleTest framework.

It looks like you need cURL working with your PHP. Since my dev machine is running XAMPP, all I needed to do was uncomment the line
extension=php_curl.dll

As exciting as the official conference schedule is, the Birds of a Feather sessions could be where things really get done. These will be ad hoc, first-come first served, semi-spontaneous groups. It is kind of hard to see who has proposed one, but this link will show you this list.

I will be hosting two BOF groups

• Modal Dialogs - Working Group for Drupal 7 (changed from Modal Dialogs - Not Just For Evil Anymore)
• Organizing Local Drupal User Groups and Events

The Drupal/AJAX revolution continues, and Drupal 6 picks up the pace conciderabily. The cleanups in the APIs for menu and form make it much easier to use Ajax to pull in content. In particular the menu_execute_active_handler() call is fantastic for Ajax, since it returns the content of a page stripped of all the chrome.

Not only was the Bay Area Drupal Camp a successful gathering and a lot of fun, but it turns out it was also a successful fund raiser for the Drupal Association. Thanks to our generous sponsors and t-shirt sales, we raised $950 more than we spent putting on the camp. That money is now a holiday gift to the Drupal Association from BADCamp and the Berkeley Drupal Users Group. We hope some of this money will go to help groups with less access to corporate sponsorship put on regional camps of their own.

Once again, special thanks to Dan, Chris, Pete and Jen for all their work making BADCamp happen, and to Sun and OpenCircle Tech for the great after-party. Let’s do it again next year!

Boy, I am just cranking out the modules this month.

http://drupal.org/project/scanner

The Search and Replace Scanner can do regular expression matches against the body and CCK text content fields on all nodes in your system. This is handy for finding html strings that Drupal’s normal search will ignore. And it can replace the matched text. Very handy if you are changing the name of your company, or are changing the URL of a link included multiple times in multiple nodes.

I have just released a new and improved version of my Private Uploads module. I am really happy with it. http://drupal.org/project/issues/private_upload

There are problems with core file handling. There can only be one files
directory, and the download method is either public or private for ALL
files. If it is set to private all files are forced to go through a
full drupal bootstrap, which makes pages with multiple images unusabily
slow. Also, Drupal only munges the displayed URL for the file, and does
nothing to actually protect the files from being downloaded with a direct

Update: View all my BADCamp blog posts

I am really excited to be organizing a DrupalCamp at UC Berkeley. The institute I work at, CITRIS, is hosting BADCamp 07, the weekend of November 3rd and 4th: 9am to 5pm.

I have been getting lots of help from the members of the “Berkeley Drupal Users Group”, particularly Dan from CivicActions, Pete from OpenCircle Technology, and Chris from Alian Design.

I just released a beta of my new experimental administration UI for the Drupal menu system, Quick Admin Menu. As opposed to my Ahah work, this interface is very client-side heavy, with only a couple of Ajax calls back to the system. This project is all about pushing the envelope in terms of ease of use.

Check out the demo. (You will not be able to submit the changes, or use the “Add item to Menu” link)