Non-Profit Drupal

Maureen Lyons had a nice write-up yesterday on her experience with drupalizing and launching the new Harvard Science site. It's a worthwhile read - but this comment definitely caught my eye.

This post was created using Scribefire. More later.

Delicious users are bookmarking various Drupal example sites with the tags 'yads' and 'drupalsite.' (The former stands for, I believe, Yet Another Drupal Site.)

So the URLs that list these bookmarks would be:

http://del.icio.us/tag/yads

http://del.icio.us/tag/drupalsite

From LifetimeTV.com to Ozzy.com !! -- that might  be all you need to know about Drupal's
versatility.

(Another email to a co-worker masquerading as a post!)

Drupal creator Dries Buytaert just released the results from his Drupal developer poll. Not so surprisingly, "we suck at" javascript/jQuery, but at the same time "we want to get better" at it.

A co-worker recently asked about Drupal screencasts. The short answer is: there are tons of them out there. I already have almost 2GB of them on my hard drive and it seems like there are more and more being produced every day. I replied with the following (undoubtedly incomplete) list. I can vouch for most of these, but not all:

http://drupal.org/handbook/customization/videocasts

http://learn.awakenedvoice.com/

http://www.drupaldojo.com/ (sometimes screencasts only available as torrents)

I've been spending a lot of time these days learning jQuery, the JavaScript library which comes bundled with Drupal 5.x. The good news is that it's really cool and powerful. It essentially allows you to forget about all those JavaScript things that fill you with dread: complex DOM iterations, browser inconsistencies, event capturing, etc. The bad news? There's a bit of a learning curve, especially if you've been avoding JavaScript because it fill you with dread.

If you think you're pretty good at Drupal and you're ready to take the next step "building out cool javascript tools" then you might want to start here:

Learning jQuery

Here's a quick tip for newbie module builders (like myself).

The process of development is likely to involve many installs, as well as many uninstalls, of your new module. If you're doing this right, you'll have a hook_uninstall() function in your .install file that cleans out any DB tables you've added.

I need to first find out if a certain value X exists in a certain column in a certain table. Ideally, I just want a binary value returned, so I can proceed with other stuff, depending on whether or not X exists. I've reduced it to one line of Drupal code:

$value_exists = db_result(db_query("SELECT IF (%d in (SELECT id FROM {some_table}), 1, 0)", $value));

It works! But it still seems pretty convoluted. Anyone know if there's a more elegant way to test if a value exists?

UPDATE: I posted this on the Drupal forums.

As I recently mentioned, the .install file of my pending (and very customized) module creates a new vocabulary, to accomodate the new nodes being imported via web services. Upon creation of the vocabulary, I need to know the vid, so I can then populate the new vocabulary with terms.

The question is: what's the proper way to do this. After some research, I went with this: