articles
Was it always this messy?
Today I felt like someone had placed me in a rickety Website Wayback Time Machine. We recently took over the hosting of a website as the owner had begun to experience troubles with both his existing host and his website designer/support.
So, we moved the sites, cried at domain registrars etc, and then cried even more once we saw the site itself.
The site had a 1218 x 9200 px background image in order to create a header and left hand menu... and a black background. The actual HTML body was white. It was also set as the background of a table cell quite deep within the page. Picture me, gob smacked.
A quick bit of cropping and some tweaks to the HTML and it was fixed, purely so I wouldn't keep myself awake at night worrying about the bandwidth being pissed away by this 230k monstrosity.
However, as I smiled and began to forget about this black JPEG of doom, I realised I had to make the same changes to each and every single page individually.
Bring back the old days? Sod that.
Fishing at Rhoscolyn, Anglesey
Back from a 5-day camping trip at Rhoscolyn in Anglesey. Due to a combo battery/stupidity incident, I have boff all photos. Here's Neil anyway, fishing out on the rocks. We got some wrasse and pollock, and one poor bugger ended up on our barbecue. He am tasty.
Some tweaks for a Drupal WoW guild site
The Tempest is was a World of Warcraft guild site built initially on Drupal 4.7 and recently upgraded to Drupal 5. It provides guild membership management via user accounts and roles, forums with public and private access, raid listings with sign-ups and other groovy stuff like private messaging, image galleries and a links/resources directory.
For managing raids and sign-ups we use a CCK type called 'raid' which includes fields for:
- Date using the Date API;
- Instance as a drop-down list (see the attached instance_list.txt for the values we use);
- Notes for anything else, eg what the goals of the run are.
A slighty tweaked Sign Up module allows guild members to sign-up for raid nodes. We also use the Calendar module along with trusty Views to provide both an Upcoming Raids List and a Raids Calendar.
First pokes at Drupal 6
With the code freeze for Drupal 6 looming, I thought it was about time I grabbed the Drupal 6.x-dev tarball and had a look-see as to what's been happening in Drupal core whilst we've been busy updating our sites to Drupal 5...
First impressions are the most important, some might say, and I was definitely impressed by the reworked installer. Its cleaner, and allows the site admin to set up configuration, the root user (with uid 1) and some other bits and bobs via a nice, multi-step wizard.
The installer also included some localisation options for installing Drupal in a language other than English, but for now I just clicked to continue in English.
The next new thing to catch my eye was that node body fields now have a "Split summary at cursor" function, which does just that.
Role Weights 1.0 for Drupal 5
I tagged Role Weights for Drupal 5 recently, and released Role Weights 1.0 for Drupal 5. Enjoy, and post any issues to the project queue.
