This is an updated version of my earlier post. Since msmtp is no longer needed, things are a lot simpler, hence the new article.

Problem: on development (and test) you don’t want to send out mail. But you /do/ want to test it. You certainly don’t want to be in my shoes when a client called me, telling she recieved dozens of confused and angry mails from users on her site, after I fired up cron on my local development machine. And sent out approximately 3000 notification mails to users, with stuff like “new post for you: “W000t, fieldz0rz developmentz in CCK is workinggggg!” (I am making this up now. Allthough…. ;) ) Problem: when debugging mail, you want to inspect the headers and often (in case of multipart or HTML mail) the source too. Most emailclients are crap for that (and right so: who other then the odd mail/webdeveloper needs to inspect the source of a mail. ever?)

Solution: the brilliant Ruby application named mailcatcher. This is a simple SMTP server and sendmail replacement that shows the mails sent to it in a handy webapplication. The webapplication features debug-tools such as headers, and source displaying.

UPDATE Please see the version of this article, the latest malcatcher has its own sendmail replacement, making installation for PHP a lot simpler.

Problem: on development (and test) you don’t want to send out mail. But you /do/ want to test it. You certainly don’t want to be in my shoes when a client called me, telling she recieved dozens of confused and angry mails from users on her site, after I fired up cron on my local development machine. And sent out approximately 3000 notification mails to users, with stuff like “new post for you: “W000t, fieldz0rz developmentz in CCK is workinggggg!”. Not cool.

Problem: when debugging mail, you want to inspect the headers and the source (in case of multipart or HTML mail). Most emailclients are crap for that (and right so: who other then the odd mail/webdeveloper needs to inspect the source of a mail. ever?)

Solution: the brilliant Ruby application named mailcatcher. This is a simple SMTP server, which shows the mails sent to it, in a handy webapplication. The webapplication features debug-tools such as headers, and source displaying.

Okay. So I did not play nice. In fact, I probably brought quite some sites out there in trouble, by disclosing a Drupal security issue on Twitter, without mentioning it to the security Team.

I had several reasons for doing this.

• I was frustrated. With this module, its code and it causing several ugly bugs in an already frustrating site. Being frustrated and having access to Twitter is never a good idea. More on this below.

Clean and maintainable pattern for blocks development in Drupal 6

Drupal7, has finally removed the confusing $op parameters from hooks. And replaced them with a family of related hooks instead; one hook per op.

Here is a way to achieve the same in Drupal 6; by building a simple router in hook_block().

yelvington writes: “The first rule of coding for Drupal: We do not write code for Drupal.” I must say, that after years , I come to the exact opposite conclusion. Right now, I should be writing another webshop (instead I am writing a blog-post, but this article is not about procastrination :)).

I was one of the most outspoken for getting the first CCK, flexinode into core. Not that project itself, per sé, but the concept.

When testing, or developing an existing site, one often does not copy over all the filebase. A site that has been collecting uploads (such as images in blogs) for a while may have a gigantic amount of images. Often, when setting up a development environment, it is too much to keep the entire filebase in sync, even when you work on a recent codebase and a recent database.

In Drupal, this gives a lot of problems with the “file not found” handling. The default Drupal .htaccess puts 404 errors, file not found, on to Drupal.