webschuur.com

Drupal is not object oriënted (OO). No really, it is not! It merely borrows some design principles from OO, and uses some design concepts (such as the Observer Pattern, or hooks, in Drupal) from OO. Though many Module developers actually use another design principle, that of Classes. When creating a module, one can borrow almost all ideas from the (good) design of classes, to create a good design for a module.

Maybe you think: “Why should I design my module”?

Actually, it is very simple: I had a slot in February. And one in May. Both are gone now.

But because of the lack of anything stable-ish, I decided to use that slot for diving into some documentation on the proposed (and some submitted) changes to 7. And on getting stuff synched and tagadelic migrated to git(hub).

I will be hosting a Drupal iDEAL Codesprint on the Drupaljam in Amsterdam.
Please add a comment there, email me (ber -- webschuur - com) or contact me in whatever other way if you want to join, more information or anything else.

iDeal is a Dutch, online payment system, widly adopted, but hard to implement.

 

In Drupal there are many iDeal implementations for übercart, but none are very solid and none are easy to implement; some are even plain insecure.

 

The fabulous basetheme Genesis is now mirrored on Git.

This has several advantages. A basetheme is used as scaffolding for your own theme. During upgrades and bugfixes, however, your altered version will be hard to keep in sync. Usually this costs a lot of manual labour; eliminating one of the advantages of a basetheme: continuous re-use of existing work.

Recently, I came to realise that Drupal is not a community platform any more, it has grown into an editorial tool over the last years. Sure, you can build a community on top of Drupal, but the tools to do so, are underdeveloped, stale, or even simply unfinished. I see more and more high-profile editorial sites being build, and see fewer successful or high-profile community being released.

Not that there are no good examples of Communities built on Drupal, there are! But their amount is so small that they hardly count.

Attached is a simple script to backup Drupal databases in an incremental-archive-friendly way (1.7KB). Instead of dumping the database into one big SQL file, this script creates many small files; one per table. With a blacklist option to exclude certain tables. It stores the structure (CREATE TABLE statements) in a separate file too.