Blog

At long last I've upgraded to D7.

I've recently taken a deep dive into multilingual site building. The site I'm working with is a simple brochure site, http://mezzaninetulum.com/. The site uses content translate, and the i18n module to help with menu and path translation. The setup was fairly straight forward to get the node translation in place. However. there were a few issues with multilingual menus and path.

Looking at the statistics now available on drupal.org. I maintain 5 modules in the top 20 list. Excluding my core contributions, code I have written is deployed on almost 1/2 of all drupal sites participating in the statistics collection.

Apparently, I don't pay enough attention to the W3C, but who does. :) So I've discovered the basis spec for all theHTML 5 progress events. The events are great. A quick look at the Event definitions reveal we get 5 new cool events loadstart, progress, error, abort, and load. Well at least error and abort are pretty obvious.

I've been working on the ImageField update for D6 today, normally when I'm working on updates I research current developments in the project's domain. A little bit of googling lead me to one of the questions that always seems to pop up in my head... Why do browsers still not have file upload progress meters?

I've been migrating a few personal development sites to Media Temple's Grid Service. I normally use bzr to manage my websites through development and roll out.

I'm finally comfortable enough with my Image* namespace to have official releases of the 2.x series of ImageField and ImageCache + ImageAPI... I'd like to extend thanks to everyone who has filed issues and submitted patches, especially Drewish and Quicksketch.

Writing simpletests for imagecache_create_url and file_create_url today, I had to change a few of Drupal's persistent variables, namely clean_url and file_downloads. I was kind of frustrated by the need to save the old values, set the values I needed for the test case, run the test, then restore the old variables. The process itself is a little dangerous in the case where you hit runtime fatal errors and the variables never get restored.

I have a love hate relationship with microformats. The apostles who think they're the end all be all of the semantic web drive me insane. 'Semantic Web' aside, microformats are a powerful approache to reusable design. Consistent markup with the appropriate JS or CSS can make for great reusable UI widgets.

ImageMagick support has been a release blocker on this module for me. My attempts at using the Imagick extension failed, and I finally broke down and wrote the imageapi_imagemagick module, and it needs testing.