Drupal

I’ve been playing with Drupal 7, creating mock-ups, so that I might move the company website to it when it’s released and so far am impressed with the improvements made.

First and foremost is CCK integration. No longer do I need to install 4 or 5 additional modules just to be able to add images that are automatically adjusted to whatever size to content, it’s all built-in! Even better is that fields can now be added to taxonomy terms so I won’t need a hack to have a picture for taxonomy terms anymore.

The Drupal 7 version of Views is looking pretty good too, though it isn’t fully functional.

One area that is lacking is a guide to creating a Drupal 7 theme from scratch. This needs to be addressed desperately unless the powers that be plan on only making use of those of us who created themes for Druapl 6 and took the time to migrate them Drupal 7.

All up, a positive experience so far.

Ever tried to set up an email subscription service in Drupal? Until recently I hadn’t and now that I’m in the midst of it I wish email newsletters would all rot in hell. The setup is the easy part. The newsletter is the hard part.

A little thing I never knew is that email clients don’t use the same regular html/css that modern or even semi-modern websites use, they are only barely compliant with ancient html specifications which I can barely recall the details of being all modernified as I am. Even worse is that different email clients render html differently!

Would you believe that the current release of Outlook 2007 has worse html support than its predecessor?

Why does the internet hate me?

I’ve overcome the majority of my problems with IE7 and the page layout is correct, but there is one minor issue remaining.

I have a div named main that contains two divs named content and sidebar. It has nothing else in it. The problem is that main has a background colour and borders that aren’t correctly displaying over the entire region because both content and sidebar are floated divs.

I can keep the layout I already have safe by removing the float from sidebar, but then the background and border extend only to the bottom of content in the sidebar, not to the bottom of main. I presume that reversing the float (so that it is on sidebar instead) would have the same issue, ie the background and borders will extend only to the bottom of content.

I could find a way to make it work but at this point I’ve achieved what I set out to do and I’m loathe to waste anymore time on it. The page layout is correct under IE7, so I’ve relegated the background/borders issue with main to the I-don’t-give-a-shit pile.

PS IE7 also has quirks with relative positioning that I didn’t mention here, but had to deal with.

In this day and age of Google and friends there are certain things you expect when software says it includes search functionality. At the most basic level you expect that if you type in ‘elephant’ it will find all instances of the word ‘elephant’. The next step is that typing ‘free’ would return all instances of ‘free’, ‘freedom’, ‘freely’, ‘freed’, or  any other variation of the word. The final, most complex step is that search itself becomes a query language allowing infinitely complex searches to be performed.

Yesterday I discovered that the search functionality included with Drupal is capable of whole word searching only.

I really hate discovering huge failings like this myself and wish they’d be clear from the beginning on such limitations. As a result of this revelation I’ve been reading through discussions on drupal.org about how the search can be improved that have been going on for a disappointingly long time, which unfortunately is quite common with Drupal (a curse of being open source), mainly because certain decision-makers in the Drupal heirarchy feel that full-text search would incur too great a performance hit. This, rather than making it possible for people to find content on your site without explicity knowing what it is called.

This even affects site administrators because when sites get large enough that admins have to search to find a certain node (article/post in Drupal-talk) they must know exatly what they’re looking for to be able to find it.

Luckily there are modules available to replace the built-in search module, but now I am required to manually search through them to find the right solution.

While I don’t think I’ve mastered Drupal I’m past the worst of the learning curve, but there were a number of things that I never saw explained anywhere which caused me many a headache. Many a time I would update some css but after uploading and forcing a page refresh the changes wouldn’t appear and I’d spend the next 20-30 minutes trying to see if I’d mispelt something (which is often the case).

Occasionally it would happen that I didn’t make a mistake though leaving me extremely perplexed and thoroughly unconfident in my ability to learn the intricacies of Drupal, only to have my original changes suddenly appear on the site without me doing anything.

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