Drupal 6

As of Wednesday of this week, there are four new modules on Drupal.org that all include the text "sponsored by The Executive Office of the President" in their description:

• Context HTTP Headers
• Akamai
• GovDelivery
• Node Embed

I've implemented a "slideshow" feature on the photosets in the Photography section of this site (and in blog posts that feature photosets). This feature links to Flickr's built-in slideshow by theming the output of the Flickr module for Drupal:

In this Drupal recipe, we will look at how this was achieved.

Many blogging tools and CMSes can automatically send out a notification message when new comments are added to a post. Drupal does not have a setting or checkbox to do this automatically. Instead, in typical Drupal fashion, it gives us the tools to set it up ourselves and customize it as desired using "actions" and "triggers".

For this recipe, we will be using the trigger module (core), as well as the token module (contrib). Token module is not strictly required for this task, but it makes it possible to send a much more informative notification.

When verifying a site for Google Webmaster Tools, one of the options uses meta tags, specifically meta name="google-site-verification".

This meta tag only needs to appear on the front page of the site, so we can easily check for "is_front" in Drupal and add the meta tag using the theme_preprocess_page() function.

When developing a module in Drupal, reading and writing session data is a fairly common pattern. However, it isn't immediately obvious what the best method is for doing this. If you need to read or write to the session in D6, the preferred method is to use the $_SESSION[] superglobal variable as follows:

Back in February, I was excited to find out that the Obama administration was using Drupal for the high-profile recovery.gov site. I was so excited in fact, I even blogged about it:
Recovery.gov and Drupal. Well, recovery.gov is back in the news, this time framed as an $18million boondoggle.

The Webform module for Drupal allows for the creation of customized confirmation e-mail messages to be sent after a user fills out a form. This can be accomplished via some simple pointing and clicking in the "Webform email settings" fieldset when editing the form. However, if you need to send out more than one customized message (say one message to the user, and one message to the site administrators), you'll need to utilize the "Additional Processing" feature of the Webform.

I just finished a quick project that had the following requirements:

1. A PHP based application needs to output content from a Drupal installation that lives elsewhere on the same server. For the purposes of this discussion, lets pretend we will be adding a "Recent Blog Posts" item to an e-commerce site that pulls directly from Drupal.
2. The Drupal content must be nicely formatted, and fairly easy for the site administrators to alter.

My solution used the views_embed_view() function for Views 2.

By default, Drupal outputs taxonomy terms as an unordered list in the div.meta section of nodes. Here is a simple CSS pattern to format taxonomy terms with either the pipe character (" | ") or as a comma-delimited list (in the example, change " | " to ", " to make a comma-delimited list).

I recently had to implement a minimal image-based customization to the standard Drupal search block. The resulting search needed to look like this:

The first step was to implement hook_preprocess_search_block_form() in my theme. I adapted mine from this hook_preprocess_search_theme_form() pattern at codegobbler.com.