braahm

Background

I wanted to create a view which lists all nodes of different content types that link to the current node displayed on the page. The nodes link via node reference. Since node references only work in one way, and I wanted to get the node references of different content types linking to the current node, I couldn't (didn't know) how to achieve this easily with just a plain view.

The solution I came about was to embed a view to display the different nodes that link to the current one, and feed that view a list of node ids of the linked nodes.

And then there was light...

Last week, I worked for the first time with a php debugger and finally things fell into place. I could see things I couldn’t see before, go into great detail, the obscure became clear...

My colleague Sven, showed me how to install xdebug on MAMP and Komodo IDE. We used this great article from Robert Douglass as a guide to get everything working.

This is just a rewrite for me to remember how to install it.

TheNextWeb did an interesting interview with Aza Raskin about great User Interfaces.

Watch the video and read some notes.

“Spaghetti code happens when concerns are mixed together”

As the JavaScript codebase grows, it becomes more complex (or, more of a mess). So the need to structure the code becomes more important.

Andrew Dupont gave a talk at MIX11 about how to make your JavaScript code more maintainable. Watch the presentation and read some notes.

Drupal ships with a lot of great things. One of these is Drupal’s taxonomy system. It allows us to categorise content and build listings automatically. Great for keeping track of our content, and the search engines love it too.

Still, it is not that easy to have the taxonomy listing be exactly how we want them to. Not a shame, we can take control over them quite easily.

It's time to take total control with Page Manager, Panels, Views and some custom "build modes".

Sorry for the “profanity” in the title, but that’s just me getting exited! Drupal is a cool and flexible platform to make powerful websites and webapplications (I may be a bit biased here). But it can be tricky to do a lot of instant, dymamic stuff to (logged in) users. Node.js on the other hand is really good at handling those concurrent actions. And now there is a module that integrates node.js with Drupal.

Last post we talked about the date related classes and how to create a date. Now, let’s find out how get the current date.

To get the current date we just sent the date message to the NSDate class:

Objective C is the programming language used to make iPhone en iPad applications. It’s fully object oriented. Foundation is Apple’s framework which we’ll use to create dates. It has all the nice classes we want.

Let's find out how to create dates for these applicatiaons.

Views + Quicktabs + Taxonomy + custom code = nice auto generated quicktabs.

We want to show the categorised site’s content in different views. This means each term needs to be a tab. Each tab displays several views. We want it to be generated automatically. Let's see how to do that.

Quicktabs is a nice little module that allows us to create blocks with tabbed content. It has a user interface to create new Quicktab blocks. The Quicktabs can be composed out of normal Drupal blocks, Views or other Quicktabs.

The nice thing is that the content of the Quicktabs can be loaded using AJAX, which might be necessary for performance reasons. The other nice thing is that Quicktabs also provides a little api to create Quicktab blocks programmatically.

Let's find out how to create them programmatically.