Drupal

The first Drupal Cape Town meetup of 2017 took place at the Bandwidth Barn on the 22nd of February 2017.

One of the sites I maintain recently had a server upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04.4, which included a new version of varnish (version 3.05) which required an update to the Varnish configuration. After setting up a new default.vcl file I was monitoring the headers sent and received to make sure that what was supposed to be cached was in fact being cached by Varnish. While testing I discovered that I was not getting any Cache-Control headers from static files like images.

I ran into issues when trying to use drupal's hook_form_alter to change some attributes of cck fields in a node form. It appears that depending on the weight of the module the form_alter is in, it might get called before the actual form element has been processed.

To make sure, you can set a function to be called after the form has been properly created, but before rendering.

In your form alter, add the after build key to the form field's array:

$form['field_course_status']['#after_build'][] = 'course_disable_status_field';

Was adapting some views handlers that were used in Open Atrium, and came across a number of places where I saw some strange constants with three stars either side of them, like: ***ATRIUM_ACTIVITY_TIMESTAMP***

This is a guest blog post I did for IS Labs.

I recently created a provider plugin for Drupal's CCK emfield module which allows you allows you to embed a Zoopy video by pasting the url into a cck field:

This is a lot easier than having to copy the embed code provided by Zoopy and paste this into a textarea.

The provider plugin then extracts the video code and displays the video on your Drupal site:

These are some of the thoughts I shared at the Drupal Johannesburg meetup held on 11 March 2009.

My thoughts on the meetup

For me, it was great to see everyone again, although I was disappointed that there weren't more than 3 new faces among the 15 or so that turned up. We do need to do something to attract more new members. I particularly enjoyed hearing about what new modules people have discovered, and enjoyed the less formal discussions afterwards.

Acquia have released an all in one Drupal install which includes Acquia Drupal, Apache, MySQL, PHP, PhpMyAdmin, and an Acquia Drupal Control Panel, to allow users to easily test and play around with Drupal, without having to get into the technical details of installing separate instances of Apache, MySQL, PHP etc.

Check it out here: http://acquia.com/downloads

Drupal web developers, or anyone in fact wishing to learn more about Drupal would be well served checking out the videos from the latest Drupal conference "DrupalCon DC 2009", available at the Internet Archive.

At a first glance, here are links to some of the videos that caught my attention: