Blogs

Don't hate your builders and themers

If you are a Drupal module developer, I have a request for you. A plea for you to help make my life easier, and likely the lives of many other site builders.

I'm currently building a website that uses a theme override to display a prettily formatted username. Drupal provides a way to do this via the theme_username() API call, so in all places where Drupal core displays a user's name, my pretty string now shows.

How do you update Drupal?

Sitting on #drupal-support on IRC, you see people drop by with update problems from time to time. With Drupal 6.21, 6.22, 7.1 and 7.2 released earlier in the week, today was such a day.

The person in question had attempted a Drupal core update via drush, but ran it in the wrong directory. Drupal had picked up this incorrect location for its core modules, so when the drupal-6.22 directory got deleted, it was unable to load any of the core modules. Oops.

This led me to wondering whether the way I manage my Drupal updates is odd and whether sharing it would be useful. Being an open source person, I am of the opinion that sharing is virtual always useful (except when it comes to cheese) so I'll document the way I manage updates here.

Elementary Dairy Particles

Amongst my favourite dairy desserts back in The Netherlands was kwark - known in english speaking countries as as quark. It's not quite yoghurt, not quite cheese, but a deliciously smooth and refreshing in-between.

For the longest time it's been unavailable in Australia, but over the past few years it has started popping up (on occasion) in some supermarkets. More recently I found that my local specialty dairy shop (La Latteria) also makes it from time to time.

However, something all local quarks have in common is that they're relatively dry and crumbly — and not smooth, like I want them to be. I decided that it was time to make my own quark, so the texture and flavour would be to my exact specifications.