Drupal

First of all a disclaimer, part of the intention of this blog post is to see if anyone else has a better solution. This is something I came up with but I'm not entirely happy with the solution as it involves running the sql query twice. :(

One of the issues I encountered when migrating nodes to Drupal, using the migrate module, was that I couldn't associate nodes with more than one taxonomy term. Actually in this example, I'm migrating content from one Drupal database to another, so I'm going to assume everyone is already familiar with the database structure, specifically the node and term_node tables.

Currently the Migrate module doesn't support full migration of poll nodes. When the poll module is enabled, you can create a content set mapping for a poll node, but you are unable to set the poll status (active or closed) and, more importantly, you can't migrate the poll choices.

Using the hook_migrate_prepare_node() and hook_migrate_complete_node() hooks, I was able to migrate all choices for each node, along with all existing votes stored.

There are a number of different authentication methods available for integrating with Google Apps. These include OpenID, OAuth and SAML amongst others. At a first glance, it's not always entirely clear on the differences between them and when you may wish to use one over another. Here's a brief overview which hopefully makes this a bit clearer.

Time is flying by. There is now only 7 weeks to go to DrupalCon San Francisco! I'm really looking forward to it I have to admit. Although I've visited the US a fair bit, I've never been to the west coast, not to mind say San Francisco. Dermot is coming over with me this time, and we're planning on taking an extra week to travel around and do some sightseeing. We're also going to visit a good friend of mine, Aimee, in LA, and then travel back up to Sacremento to visit other friends.

The Image FUpload module is an add-on to the Image and CCK's Imagefield modules, and allows you to upload multiple images at once with just a few simple clicks. You can use it with both single-value and multi-value imagefields, and it will automatically create the nodes for you.

For a project I've been working on recently, I needed the ability to have a two column table layout in Views. The idea was to place the field label in the first column, and the field data in the second. I had tried achieving the same layout using the unformatted default layout with some CSS, but was unable to get the label and field data to line up correctly, and so eventually wrote a views plugin to achieve the effect using tables.

The screenshot below shows what the final result looks like.

Project page: http://drupal.org/project/views_two_column_table

New releases of the FAQ module have been made - versions 5.x-2.13 and 6.x-1.9. This release includes a fair few new features, including the ability to drag and drop questions when re-ordering and a new "administer faq weights" permission. There are also a number of bug fixes too.

The new features added include:

• #390404 - added [faq] input filter.
• #475600 - added "administer faq weights" permission, and moved weight ordering tab to each individual FAQ page.

Over a year and a half after Drupal 6 was released, I've finally gotten around to releasing a Drupal 6 version of the Ocadia theme. The design is based on a Wordpress theme done by Beccary and subsequently ported to Drupal 4.7 by Scar_T. I came on-board after creating a Drupal 5 version of it for one of my friend's websites, Irlandia Ceramics.

I don't get asked to review books often, so I was delighted when I got asked to review Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization by Ben Finklea, it being top of my list of Drupal books to buy. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is all about improving your site's position in search results. It's part science, part art, and involves a lot of small, but simple, improvements to your website. An important SEO skill is knowing what keywords to use for your site and how to avoid common mistakes that could have a detrimental effect on your site's ranking. This book does an excellent job at explaining just that and includes great advice and step by step instructions.

The book assumes you're a Drupal newbie, which I was a bit surprised by at first. I wasn't really expecting to see instructions on how to install a Drupal module, but this approach is used throughout the book and is a strong selling point. It takes the magic out of SEO so everyone, regardless of skill level or familiarity with Drupal, can achieve the most from their site.