drupal

Please, keep in mind this post was written for Drupal 6 and Views 2! D7/Views 3 sites might not take so kindly to it.

Recently I was looking at creating a new Todo Feature with a due date. I cracked open CCK’s manage fields UI and added a date field, careful to keep in mind that the default value should be no date, which just happens to translate as NULL. You see, for my Todo use case, not all Todos would have a deadline.

My next step was to create a View of all upcoming items. I wanted the next most urgent todo to float to the top of the list. Sadly, NULL counts as 0 in database land, so my carefully clicked Sort was preloading all my urgent todos with all the lowest priority tasks.

Seeing as this was a SQL problem, I googled the ‘net for viable query tweaks. I found a nice article illustrating exactly what I wanted: MySQL Sort Order with NULL. The grand secret? Sort first by whether the duedate is NULL to flip your empty values to the bottom of the result set.

Read on to see how I added this change to my View.

One of the neat features of Drush is it’s configurability. Setting the defaults for various behaviors and command options allows you to build really simplified, specialized workflows. You can create personal settings defaults by dropping a `drushrc.php` file in one of the places Drush will look, such as inside a .drush folder of your home directory.

The following post originally appeared on the GoingOn.com blog.

After more than a year of continuous investment in GoingOn’s Drupal 6 platform, the idea of upgrading to Drupal 7 is incredibly daunting. We have custom modules from form behaviors down to the access layer, we have features encapsulating hundreds of exported components, and an aggressive feature release schedule that does not set aside 6 months for a complete rewrite of the codebase just for a new version of Drupal. What to do?

We’ve been playing around with the idea of iterating our Drupal 6 platform toward Drupal 7. By pulling markup, design patterns, APIs, and architecture in Drupal 7 down into platform incrementally, we hope to shorten the final leap that will come when upgrading the entire system.

Some months ago I wanted the solution to overriding a Views Field template entirely from within a module. I spent hours trawling documentation and issues, and playing with a little trial and error. In the end, I came up with a solution:

There are two ways to change contexts. The new awesomeness is to use Features or other exportable techniques to create a new version of your modified contexts, and push the old ones out of the way.

However, when I avoid hacking [atrium] core, I prefer the old way–today that’s alter hooks.

If you’ve delved into some of the enhanced bookmarking magic in Firefox, you know that entering the world of the Organize Bookmarks tool provides some additional options in how you save your bookmarks.

If you want to make an exported [node-based] View smoothly integrate with Spaces, you can use the following code to modify the View structure with the “Content in current space” filter. This filter does nothing if the View is not itself in a Space, otherwise it restricts all results to content in the same space. Add any conditions you want to control whether the Spaces integration is applied.

I’m not a huge fan of the Automatic Nodetitles module. It’s got a lot of user interface overhead, and yet I’ve never given a non-programmer access to that administration page. On top of that, someone gets a headache from it on one of the forum sites I frequent every few weeks.

For those with the programming chops to avoid it, why keep the overhead of an entire project, when a custom module snippet will probably be more than enough?

Working on integrating the Features Server feature into OpenAtrium. My intention is to set it up as another Casetracker Project type.

OpenAtrium provides a solid case tracker and documentation system, and is a natural fit for the infrastructure of a Drupal.Org-style project ecosphere. Integrating them will allow me to post Features I’ve created to a place where I might actually have a means to get feedback on my work, let alone provide support.