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.

Tagadelic, Drupals tag-cloud module, was found with a security vulnerability.

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().

I think everyone knows these moments: You have a problem, a question. And just by asking that question, the answer pops up in your head. It happens to me often, when programming. It is obvious: by asking the question, you have to analyze and simplify the problem. And by doing so

Today, there was another great way Stackoverflow helped me: I had a problem with a Drupal pager-query on a none-distinct SQL query. And right when I was finishing up, the answer struck me.

It seems Grid systems, or CSS frameworks, are being picked up by the Drupal themer community. I think this is a good thing. Some think it is a bad thing. So let us have a look at the downsides and upsides of grid systems in Drupal.

Grid Systems force you to change your HTML, that is bad.

This is wrong, for three reasons.

1. It might be bad, if it were true. But not all grid systems, or their implementations require changes to the HTML, in theory. I love SASS and its tool-kit Compass.