Web Development

Rails tip: restful_authentication without a username

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I've personal never understood the point of having a username for web sites when 99% of them also require an email address that is unique to you - just use the email address! In the world of Rails development many developers use the excellent restful_authentication to provide the user login structure, but again out of the box it uses a username. Silly thing. So instead, here's how to make restful_authentication sit rather happy with just an email address.

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Problems with Drupal 5 - database table sequences/counters

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A key design flaw in Drupal 5, especially for anyone dealing with large quantities of data, is that it doesn't use the database's built in auto-incrementing counters for its table primary keys, instead it manually tracks an per-table integer in a table called "sequences" which is updated each time new records are added. This is a bad design in all sorts of ways and really should have died a horrible death many years ago.

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Bug in Drupal Panels v2.0rc1a to watch for

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There's a bug in Drupal module Panels v2.0rc1a which you may need to keep an eye out for. If you happen to be using the default_panel_minis() hook to programmatically load minipanels you won’t be able to edit or export the minipanel once it has been loaded:

The only way I’ve found to work with the minipanel from that point is to paste the exact same code from the default_panel_minis() hook into the importer. A bit of a bug, you might say.

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

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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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