Drupal

Entity registration module

The Entity Registration module is a nice module for allowing and tracking user registrations on any entity. It even has some nice extras: you can restrict the number of people that can sign up, integrate with drupal commerce for fee-based signups,...

Extra requirements

As part of a project I was asked to deliver an event signup system. A lot of the functionality was already provided by the entity registration module, but some parts were missing:

Today I stumbled across a comic, I saw before and that still made me laugh. It's one of those great XKCD jokes:

It also reminded me of the drupal security book "Cracking Drupal"

So the thought of today: please write secure code. Do this by taking advantage of the Drupal API, and be sure to sanitize your database inputs.

Introduction

While working for a client I needed to make a connection to Microsoft SQL Server. After investigating I found out there are two options: connecting with a PDO driver (only possible on the windows platform for now) or via an ODBC connection. Today I would like to explain the first option, as I needed some time to find out how to do it and combine all the small pieces.

Since my previous pair of drupal shoes were a bit worn out (normal after wearing them for a year non-stop). I started designing a new pair: another model, a different accent color.

A few weeks ago I discovered Bitbucket, online hosting for DVCS code. This is what they tell about their service:

When working on a site, there was a feature that enabled a new content type with certain fields. Apparently there was no need for a body field on the content type. I recreated the feature, but when deploying this feature, it will not remove the body field, as this could mean a loss of data.

I had to make use of hook_update to remove the field. Since it was a drupal 7 site, this means using the Field API. But in order to do this programmatically, you first need to understand the terminology.

I suppose you read my blog post on custom RSS feeds. I wanted to give a small update, as the solution described there was not sufficient. In the end I needed to output an XML file and every item had to be in the same format. As I was outputting the last node for three different content types, I needed to do some custom coding. The node_feed function was not the ideal solution.

I ended up making my own node_feed function. Here's the code:

I saw this movie yesterday. To my opinion it is a great video trying to describe what motivates people and also giving an explanation as to why opensource software and opensource communities are so great! 

Last week I went to the drupal government days. On thursday I was able to have a quick chat with Dries. And apparently my friend Nektarios Sylligardakis took a picture of it. Thanks!

For a client I needed to make an RSS feed with the latest item of three content types. The feed needed to contain three items: one for each of the three chosen content types.

I was first thinking about using views, to make a selection and then make a feed display. But it's impossible to make union queries in views 2. I was able to make a display containing the three content types, limiting it to three items and sort the list on post date descending. But that didn't guarantee me to have an item for each content type.