Drupal

I just love Drupal's architecture - export & API hooks

While the architecture itself is improving with age, I just love that so many modules have followed Drupal's concepts and have added API hooks all over the place. For example, in the new Panels 2 you can export panels to files then set them up in a module with e.g. a default_panel_minis hook to have them automatically loaded. This allows you then to develop complex views and panels locally, push your module to the production server and have the new views and panels automatically show up - pure awesomeness!

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Problems with Drupal 5 - clumsy record sorting

More of a problem for administrators than site visitors, and definitely more of a nuisance than a real problem, it can be frustrating dealing with lists of records in Drupal 5, especially when you need to resort or reorder the list. A perfect example is using the Nodequeue module, one of the most popular modules which lets you create a queue of articles/nodes so you can e.g. manually create a list of top stories for the week; it's interface for managing the queue looks like this:

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Drupal makes "An illegal choice"

Here's a weird one. Have a content type with about forty fields. When I click Preview on an empty form it gives the error "An illegal choice has been detected. Please contact the site administrator." which you're sure to agree is not terribly useful. I took a look at the watchdog logs and saw that the field throwing the error is a required integer checkbox that had no items selected. So instead of saying "You must select one of the items" it says "sir you are a smeghead" - not very useful, Drupal.

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Optimizing Drupal 6 for massive sites

A developer by the name of Wesley Tanaka worked on a Drupal 6 site that involved millions of content records, presumably imported from another CMS. During the development he discovered a few issues which hampered Drupal's search maintenance speed and wrote up a wonderful article explaining how to boost performance.

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