drupal 6

...there's a site for that.

I just found out about SimplyTest.me today, and it allows you to, well, simply test any Drupal.org-hosted module, theme, or distribution in seconds.

No longer do you need to spin up (or maintain) a live website locally (which usually takes an extra minute or two—at least) just to check out a module or make sure a theme or distribution fits your needs before using it on a live or development site.

Instead of simply getting a screen shot or trying a theme on a demo site, you get a full Drupal website set up and configured with the module/theme/distro (as well as it's dependencies), so you can play with it to your heart's content (for 30 minutes if you don't have an account on the site, an hour if you do).

According to the site's Q&A page, Drupal 6, 7, and 8 are all supported—even with sandbox projects! You can read more about the architecture and service implementation on the simplytest.me project page on Drupal.org.

Check it out, and thank Patrick Drotleff and all the sponsors (who help provide the hosting) for the hard work on this awesome tool!

I was inspired today to get XHProf working on my Mac, using MAMP PRO 2.0.5/PHP 5.3.6, after reading @Dave Reid's tweet. Since I'm not leaving for DrupalCon until tomorrow, what else could I do today? There's an excellent article on Lullabot that will help you get 85% of the way towards having XHProf up and running on your Mac, working with your Drupal sites, but there are a few missing pieces and little tips that will help you get XHProf fully-armed and operational.

Ooh, pretty visualizations!

First, after you've installed and configured XHProf on your Mac (and restarted MAMP/Apache so the configuration takes effect), you need to do a few things to get it working well with Drupal. For starters, if you have the Devel module installed, head over to its configuration page (at admin/config/development/devel), and check the box that says "Enable profiling of all page views and drush requests."

This morning, I was presented with quite the conundrum: one of my servers suddently started having about 4x the normal MySQL traffic it would have in a morning, and I had no indication as to why this was happening; traffic to the sites on the server was steady (no spikes), and I couldn't find any problems with any of the sites.

However, after inspecting the Apache (httpd) error logs for the Drupal 6 sites, I found a ton of PHP warnings on almost all the sites. Something like the following:

I haven't seen much about this feature yet, so I figured I'd put it through its paces and share what I found. WYSIWYG editing on iOS devices is finally here! For a long time, contentEditable support has been lacking on iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches, and it's been slightly annoying, as the only way to add richly-formatted text on these devices was doing a two-step through finding the carat characters and writing the HTML yourself.

Plus, some WYSIWYG editors (like TinyMCE) simply disabled the WYSIWYG from attaching to a textarea if it detected an iOS device. No longer, however: I've tested CKEditor (latest nightly) and TinyMCE (latest nightly), and both work perfectly (surprisingly well, in fact!) on the iPad running iOS 5 beta 6:

The above screenshot was taken while editing a page on a Drupal site (flockNote) using the WYSIWYG module and the latest nightly build of TinyMCE. You can get nightly builds under TinyMCE's 'Develop' section.

Demonstration:

Here's a video of me using TinyMCE on my iPad (it's fast, and works great!):

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.).

I'd like to thank Flocknote for giving me the development time to work on this module, as we needed something like it for the new 'version 3' launch of www.flocknote.com.

The Honeypot Method

Honeypot is aptly named because, just like Pooh bear is drawn towards honey jars, spam bots are drawn towards form fields—especially form fields they think will give them the ability to link back to their own websites. So, the Honeypot method basically inserts a hidden form field to Drupal (or other) forms with a field name like 'homepage' (you can set it to whatever you want). End users don't see the field, so they don't fill it out. But spam bots (usually using prewritten scripts) do see the field (usually), and add something to it. The Honeypot module detects this and blocks the form submission if there's something in the field.

With the awesome new #states implementation in Drupal 7, and for form usability in general, it's often good to be able to selectively, or completely, disable form autocompletion for your users. One example I just encountered was a form that has two fields that are alternatively shown or hidden depending on the value of a checkbox earlier in the form. However, Google Chrome, in its infinite wisdom, was autofilling the hidden field, which shouldn't have a value if hidden, so I had to set the input's 'autocomplete' value to 'off.'

For simple textfields, here's how you could do that in a hook_form_alter() (in this example, I was disabling autocomplete on the user registration form's email field):