Drupal

Drupal: Developer Unfriendly?

20after4 — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:12:36 -0500

Jesse Farmer has a good article at 20Bits critiquing 4 Problems with Drupal. The problems that Jesse points out are very relevant and this is really worth reading if you are looking into Drupal. I don't agree with some of the conclusions and I will not be switching to Rails/MVC but Drupal is definitely defective even if it is very useful. From TFA:

I really don't mean to dump on Drupal so much. Well, ok, I do, but it's not out of spite. Part of it is that, as a developer, I find Drupal to be very unfriendly. I know exactly what I want to do and more often than not Drupal is a roadblock. Add to this the performance issues and I think anyone trying to use Drupal to design a medium-to-large sized interactive website should definitely take a second look.

It may be just a little bit ironic that I'm running DeveloperFriendly.com with such an unfriendly CMS but Drupal is currently serving me well. For the time being I will just enjoy the irony.

Improving Drupal's support for the rel-tag Microformat

20after4 — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 16:27:40 -0500

I recently installed the Operator extension for Firefox. Operator is an interesting little extension which attempts to expose microformats embedded in web pages through a toolbar in the browser.

While browsing this site with Operator installed I noticed a problem with the tags that are typically attached to each post to organize the site into categories. Drupal attempts to conform to the rel-tag microformat by attaching a rel="tag" attribute to each tag link (Look at the section titled Tags: at the top of this post.) The problem is that drupal uses numbers for each category (aka "Taxonomy Term.") and numbers don't make very readable tags. As several others have already pointed out, this could be considered a deficiency in the microformat. The rel-tag specification doesn't provide any alternate way to specify a text-version of the tag, other than the last segment of the url. In the case of drupal, the last segment of a taxonomy url is the taxonomy term id, which is a number.

Fortunately, this is one case where the flexibility of Drupal's API comes to the rescue. I did a quick search of Drupal.org and turned up this post. The solution offered was not up to date with Drupal 5.x and it didn't work for my version, however, that article mentioned a new API hook in Drupal HEAD called hook_link_alter, a feature that eventually made it's way into the final release for Drupal 5. Using hook_link_alter I was able to hack together a short function that rewrites the tag links so that they end with the tag name instead of a number. Fortunately for us, Drupal's taxonomy system ignores the extra baggage on the end of taxonomy URLs and everything still works as expected.

All of this explanation has quickly become much longer than the code that I am describing. Without further delay, here is some code that you can place in your drupal theme's template.php to make more sensible rel-tag taxonomy links:


/* Alter rel-tag links to include the link tag name in the url */
function blog_link_alter(&$node, &$links) {
        foreach ($links AS $module => $link) {
                if ($link['attributes']['rel'] == 'tag' && !empty($link['title'])) {
                        $links[$module]['href'] .= "/".$link['title'];
                }
        }
}

Warning: This is slightly hackish because I am placing a drupal api hook inside a theme template.php - this hook is prefixed with the blog module name and it actually belongs inside the blog module, however, I don't want to alter drupal core code so I chose to place this in my theme.

Technorati tags: drupal, rel-tag

Drupal

20after4 — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 16:11:10 -0500

Drupal is an Open Source content management system written in PHP. Drupal is the platform of choice for DeveloperFriendly.com and several other projects hosted here. As you might expect, we occasionally come up with some interesting code for Theming and Extending the system to meet our needs. As often as possible we will post code and development tips here in the hope that others will benefit from our experience with Drupal development.