drupal – Ian McKellar

Moving from Drupal to WordPress for blogging

I really like Drupal quite a lot. It’s powerful and flexible, it’s code is clear and well written and it’s extension mechanism is one of the best I’ve ever seen. All this flexibility tends to distract me from actually writing blog posts. So I’ve moved back to WordPress. If you’re reading this over RSS expect …

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OpenID for the mathematically challenged

The other day I got the OpenID bee in my bonnet and grabbed James Walker‘s module and installed it on my server. Actually I grabbed it from CVS, and then discovered that the CVS version is half-ported to some new Drupal 6 form API, so I ended up using the DRUPAL-5 tag.

Anyway, I use Dreamhost which I love for many many reasons (primarilly it’s really cheap and seems to work really well). Unfortunately they don’t build their PHP with BCMath or even GMP, which means my PHP can’t do the hard math that’s required for crypto. Luckily there’s a mode of OpenID that doesn’t require any work on the relaying party side. So I made a small change that allows James’ module to work in this “dumb” mode.

State of Drupal

I just watched Dries’ State of Drupal talk. It’s an interesting insight into where he sees the project going. He discusses how Drupal has eliminated the need for the webmaster and is moving towards eliminating the need for a developer, and there’s some discussion of how to eliminate the designer.

Burning your Drupal feed in two easy steps

[flickr-photo:id=136409681,size=m] FeedBurner provides all kinds of neat stats, but it didn’t seem straight-forward to “burn” my blog feed since I’m using Drupal 5. After a little fiddling I think I’ve got a pretty good idea how to make it work in probably the simplest way possible. In fact, it doesn’t require and Drupal configuration at all.

First I set up a FeedBurner account and burned my feed. The feed Drupal produces for me is: http://ianloic.com/rss.xml. Now when I access http://feeds.feedburner.com/ianloic I get the contents of that feed. It’s pretty simple, but so far nobody is going to see that feed.
Then I simply told Apache to redirect all requests for that feed, except the ones from the FeedBurner bot to my FeedBurner feed. With the slight of hand magic of mod_rewrite this is pretty straight forward. In the root of every Drupal install there’s an .htaccess file containing a bunch of stuff. I just added a few lines to the mod_rewrite.c block of that file:
```
  # Rewrite rss.xml to http://feeds.feedburner.com/ianloic
  # unless FeedBurner is requesting the feed
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^ianloic\.com$ [NC]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner.*
  RewriteRule ^rss.xml$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/ianloic [L,R=301]
```
This will cause Apache to send a 301 redirect to http://feeds.feedburner.com/ianloic any time anyone requests http://ianloic.com/rss.xml, unless their HTTP User Agent begins with FeedBurner.

Now I’ve got access to all the FeedBurner statistics and fun features. Since I didn’t actually touch the Drupal configuration I’m pretty sure a similar approach can be taken to applying FeedBurner to any feed.

Syntax Highlighting for Drupal

[flickr-photo:id=252312738, size=m] While writing my last post, I felt the need to post some source code examples and I wanted them to be pretty. Looking around drupal.org, I failed to find what I wanted. There were a few options, the codefilter module, but that only supported PHP highlighting, the geshifilter module, but that doesn’t support Drupal 5.x which I’m running, or patches against codefilter to add GeSHi support.

So I did what was probably the wrong thing and wrote my own. At least I didn’t write it from scratch, I based it largely on codefilter, with some inspiration from the patches to codefilter that add GeSHi support.

I hacked up GeSHi a little as it wants to link keywords of most languages to reference sites. While this sounds like a good idea in theory it was linking HTML keywords off to some random site I didn’t really like and didn’t think was that good, so I disabled that functionality.

Using the module is pretty straightforward. You wrap your source code in tags that look like

<code language="LANGUAGE">...</code>

where LANGUAGE is a supported language. If there’s an enter in your block then it treats it as a block otherwise it renders it inline. Also, some whitespace is trimmed, so you can force a single line to be treated as a block by putting an enter at the start or the end.

Right now it’s being maintained in the same source control as I’m using for my web site, but I’ll move it into Trac and Subversion eventually. For the time being it’s attached.