Planet
Advanced Forum road map
Despite the fact that Advanced Forum for D5 is alpha and the D6 version has a warning not to use it, there seems to be an awful lot of people using this module. While I've had a "to do" post up on the DruBB group for some time, I haven't written out my "plan of attack". So I decided to write up a roadmap so people can have an idea of where I'm headed. Some of this is straight copied from my post on the drubb group and some is new. Hopefully it will be helpful to people using the module. I'm going to enable comments for the moment but please do not use this for posting support/feature requests. Use the issue queue.
This is the plan:
Fix the known D5 bugs and do another alpha.- Fix the known D6 bugs and do a first alpha.
- Do the code clean up section to make it easier for others to help.
- Do the "Improving what's there" section.
- Adding the new features in whatever order strikes my fancy. (Hey, life can't be totally planned. ;)
- More alphas will come out as needed. I try to keep them coming on a regular basis to discourage people from using the devs as my dev versions tend to be broken.
- Once I've added all the features that I plan to put in 1.x, I will make betas.
- Much testing will ensue. Simpletest, maybe? I haven't looked into that whole testing business, yet.
- RCs until it's all peachy.
- Official 1.x release. Yay!
- 2.x branch will start to keep up with core forum changes. Exactly when this will happen and what shape this will take is still up in the air. See the discussion.
Managing your views in code
Note: This is for Drupal 5.x and views 1.6.
Panels 2 comes with a nifty exporter that will dump all your panels related stuff (pages, views panes, mini panels, etc) into one export file set up to work as a module. It's a really useful feature for moving them from site to site or simply keeping them in code for outside the database backups.
Views 1, being a much older module, doesn't have quite as nice of an exporter. It does allow you to export your views one at a time but using that export in a module takes a bit more work. This article will show you one way of doing it. There are other ways, such as putting all the views in one file, but I find this method easier to maintain.
hook_theme_registry_alter for advanced template control
I'm in the process of porting Advanced Forum to Drupal 6.x and am trying to take advantage of the new theme system. One of the things I wanted to do was get rid of the requirement to copy the forum theme to the site theme directory. My goal was to make it so the whole thing could be run right out of the module directory but allow any template copied to the user's theme to override what's in the module. merlinofchaos helped me quite a bit and told me about hook_theme_registry_alter(), which isn't documented much yet. I decided to write up what I learned today in this article. Keep in mind that this is written by someone who has only really dug into the new theme system in the last few days, but merlinofchaos gave it a look over and he thought it looked ok. If you have comments on the article, I'd like to hear from you, but please no support questions. I barely understand this myself. ;)
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The theme system in D6 does an excellent job of handling template files which will work well for most people. If you need very specific control over the theme registry, however, there is hook_theme_registry_alter(). This hook lets you get in and modify the registry directly. It has a paramater, $theme_registry, which holds the whole registry. To see what's in it, you can use something like this:
<?php
MODULENAME_theme_registry_alter($theme_registry) {
// Assuming you have the devel module installed
dsm($theme_registry);
}
?>This will give you a nicely formatted listing of the entire array to check out. By modifying this array, you can affect how template files are handled.
Introducing Advanced Profile
The third incarnation of my user profiles tutorial, this time in module form, has arrived. I'd like to introduce the Advanced Profile module. It still needs work and isn't feature complete, but it's a good start and available to play around with.
It's been a long road getting here. In April of 2007, I spent a few weeks of free time learning nodeprofile and theming and put together what I thought was a pretty nice looking user profile for Coulee Region ONLINE. Since so many people had helped me learn while I struggled to create it, I decided to pass on the knowledge by writing a tutorial. It turned out to be more popular than I ever imagined and generated quite a few support requests. A lot of that was lost when I moved the tutorial between sites but I think the comments were over 400!
Having so many people use the tutorial pointed out a lot of flaws. Between that and improvements to the modules I used, I decided it was time to write a second version a few months later. This version improved on the first quite a bit but also had some issues I was never able to track down. The forums here are filled with support requests in addition to what I've gotten by email and on IRC. I'm having a terrible time keeping up with all the support and a few months ago I started thinking it was really time to do a version 3.
A better way to select taxonomy terms
When building a business directory that will have non-admins adding entries and selecting categories, you need to make it as easy as possible. By default, Drupal offers up a multi select box to scroll through possibly hundreds of terms and control-click the categories you want your entry to be in. Definitely not user friendly.
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