Drupal

I will be heading into Portland mid afternoon today (Sunday). I would love to meet and catch with the drupalers I often interact with (but have never met)!

Are you a fan of Catan? Come battle with us during the after hours (and Monday). Watch my tweets to know our game location. Feel free to connect with me via twitter (elvismcneely) to schedule lunch or other activities.

Happy Travels!

Success?

I built a Drupal 7 site recently that uses commerce. On each product page is a registration form (think ubercarts+events). I was able to get all working very well, rigorously tested. First let me describe my setup, in case it helps someone else.

While writing a custom module with it's own content type, I needed to add a menu_local_task to node/x/edit path AND for it to only show up when editing the custom content type. Adding a menu local task is easy, but hiding it from other content types proved fruitless. And, it seems many others had similar needs and problems.

I thought I would share with the rest of the community this great little time saver. FireQuery, needs Firebug, allows you to query the DOM and see what changes take place - without saving a file or refreshing the page. Just like testing  CSS changes in Firebug.

I am just reaching out to the Drupal community to let those who knew me by mcneelycorp, that I am now elvis2. I wish there were a more formal way of announcing this, like through sticky signatures. Why the name change?

My 4 year old knows I work with Drupal. Sometimes she will rush to the keyboard and klak her fingers on the keys looking for attention. When I ask her what she is doing she repsonds "making a website - like you daddy".

This day (of the video) I let her get one step closer to becoming the next drupaler in this house...

UPDATE: I had a sever issue and had to rebuild the site. Currently the video is unavailable.

Just wanted to plug for Virtualmin and Drupal...

I have been using Virtualmin for about 6 months now, so far so good. Though cPanel is widely used and looked at as a standard, the Virtualmin control panel doesn't mess up your OS (I use Centos 5). cPanel does many overrides and changes to the Centos OS, and some say cPanel creates a security risk to Centos.

During the last few days I have been working on a module that automates updating product information from distributors.

About two weeks ago I shared a site recipe (Drupal + webform + SugarCRM) to get Drupal talking to SugarCRM. In my previous Sugar post I mentioned I would make a patch for sugarwebform module, since it was a bit out dated (Sugar changed it's code a bit causing sugarwebform to break).

I have to give a big hand to all the module developers that make upgrading smooth. I was very hesitant to upgrade my Drupal install and the contributed  modules since it has been 14 months since my last big upgrade.

I thought I would just share with you some details...

1 hour before this blog post I was running on Drupal 5.7 with 13 outdated contributed modules.

This project was set aside last June, as I was working on it in my spare time. Shopping.com (aka SDC) is now pushing all it's partners to switch to the Version 3 platform within the next 6 months. Yikes! I figured I need to give this module more priority. Here is the progress so far, for Drupal 6. What is functional...

A client recently asked for SugarCRM integration with Drupal. I just wanted to report on my findings. There are two SugarCRM + Drupal solutions...

Back in October of 2008 Purdue students were well organized Obama supporters. Every time I went to campus I saw Obama supporters out rallying and sharing talking points with passer-byers. On two occasions I took the time to ask campus Obama supporters what they liked about him, trying to understand their position. I was interested in knowing if they really were thinking for themselves or letting the media / friends think for them. I was unable to find common ground with the campus supporters and Obama's key policies.