Drupal

Interesting little look at how the popular CMS Drupal’s UI compares with arguably the more familiar UI of Gmail. Raises some interesting points for anyone working with or developing a CMS (i.e. not just Drupal).

The inclusion of jQuery in a custom Drupal theme seems to cause a lot of confusion to people new to Drupal. There is, of course, a proper way of doing it and it's not that difficult once you know how.

If you're using the Fivestar module for Drupal you'll probably at some point want to use your ratings within a View. Assuming you're enabling the Fivestar rating against the content type as opposed to via a CCK field then you'll need to include it in your View via a relationship in order to display it with the associated node. The following instructions are for achieving this in Drupal 6 (I expect the process is similar in Drupal 7, but I haven't yet tried this).

Last week Drupal 7 was officially released, there's already been a number of beta and release candidates, but this is the real deal. I thought I should take a quick look and see whether it has been worth all the anticipation. So far I am really impressed.

Drupal 6 permissions have a tendency to give me a real headache, in part because as a site grows in terms of modules so does the list of available permissions. However, perhaps far more frustrating is when a certain combination of permissions just don't work as you'd expect/want.

One case of this, that I regularly encounter, is when I want to allow different user roles to create and manage different content types.  This only seems to work when a particular role has been given the administer nodes permission, but this just overrides far too many permissions.