webschuur.com

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.

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.

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

In Drupal there are several iDeal implementations for übercart, but none are very solid and none are easy to implement. Moreover: the iDeal übercart implementations lack some error handling, which may not matter for smaller sites, but for large payment flows, this is far from ready.