modules

I've had a nice go at making private messaging capabilities for flockNote work a lot nicer than the out-of-the-box Privatemsg module experience, by simplifying everything to the point that it's closer to the Facebook Direct Message system than the normal Privatemsg UX. (Privatemsg is the premiere way of handling private messaging in Drupal. It's already awesome out of the box... just needed a bit more help for our particular site ;-).

Now that I've released a Drupal 6 backport of what I originally wrote as a Drupal 7 module, I figured I would write a little bit in the way of introducing one of the simpler, and more user-friendly ways of controlling spam in Drupal (as opposed to other also-helpful methods, like Mollom, CAPTCHA, etc.).

In Drupal 6, I would often resort to using my theme's template.php file to implement template_preprocess(), and add in the class to Drupal's $body_classes array. In Drupal 7, some new hooks were introduced that allow me to do this more easily, and inside my .module files.

Introducing hook_preprocess_HOOK()

A few months ago, I was starting to get fed up with having to manually re-patch the WYSIWYG module on about five of my sites every time it was due for an update, to incorporate functionality that I had hoped would make it into WYSIWYG as a regular button/plugin (see issue).

For some time, I've been using the most hackish ways of including custom CSS and Javascript in my site via themes and custom modules. The problem has been (at least, in Drupal 6) that the hook_preprocess_page() function, inside which I'd really like to include my drupal_add_css() and drupal_add_js() functions, due to the fact that it's easy to see what page I'm on, or what kind of page I'm on, is not able to add CSS or JS to the page, due to the order in which the hooks are fired.

A couple days ago, when building a quick site with limited functionality (basically a pretty front end to a database website), I ran into a hiccup with my custom module/theme for the site, which caused me to scratch my head for a few minutes.

In my custom module (called 'idcards'), I added a stylesheet for a couple forms on the site using the drupal_add_css() function: