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It's Amazing What You Find: Crusty Bits of the Menu System

By joachim, Sun, 10/17/2010 - 16:13

I've been poking in the innards of the menu system the last few days. This is due to yet another client wanting to do something that goes completely against the grain of Drupal.

In this case, it's the way Drupal only shows you menu links you have access to. This to me seems perfectly reasonable good usability: why show you something you can't use? On the other hand, there is a long-standing feature in Comment module that shows anonymous users a 'Login or register to post comments' link on nodes, so 'incitements to action' or whatever the social media buzzword is do exist in Drupal.

So the challenge was to show a link that the anonymous user can't use, send them to login, and back to the link they wanted in the first place. The last part is just some hook_form_alter() work with form redirection (though it did allow me to discover that everything drupal_get_form() is passed is available to the alter hooks, just in a funny place). The access to the menu item is done by intercepting in hook_menu_item_alter() to save a twin of the menu item, and a checkbox in the menu edit form to trigger this. Even registering the path is easy: a custom menu access callback which takes as access arguments those of the original item plus its access callback and negates whatever the original item would return for access. The part I'm (so far) stuck on is getting hook_menu_alter() to know about what the admin user has done in hook_menu_item_alter(): the next job will probably involve creating a truly ugly query that uses %LIKE% to grab menu items based on their options array.

But that's not what I came here to tell you about today.

In my prodding around of the menu system, I found that menu router items have a 'block_callback' property, with its own database field and everything. Now get this: only one item in the entire {menu_router} table on D6 has this filled, and to boot, it has absolutely no effect. (It's the admin theme page, by the way.) This property is something to do with the way that the root admin page is made out of things that are sort of blocks, but not quite. If the property exists on the router item, then the callback is called to add (!!) to the content. (The admin theme page of course plays no part in the root admin page.)

So we had here a completely useless database field, probably left over from Drupal 5 or even earlier. By the way, in a standard Drupal 7 install, the database field is completely unused. I made a dummy patch to get the issue queue testbot confirm that we never get to this particular piece of code, and the superfluous field has now been removed. It's amazing what you find!

By the way, if anyone fancies some bikeshedding, I still don't have a name better than 'menu_login' for this module. To your paintbrushes!

The Oxford Comma

By joachim, Wed, 06/30/2010 - 15:59

Here's a little function I wrote today because I needed to be able to turn a list of between one and three items into a string like 'apples, oranges, and pears', 'apples and pears', or just 'stairs'.

I figured I might as well handle everything in one place, and throw in the option to have an 'or' instead of an 'and'. There may be occasions you don't want the Oxford comma, but I can't think of any.

/**
* Grammatically fun helper to make a list of things in a sentence, ie
* turn an array into a string 'a, b, and c'.
*
* @param $list
*  An array of words or items to join.
* @param $type
*  The text to use between the last two items. Defaults to 'and'.
* @param $oxford
*  Change this from default and you are a philistine.
*/
function oxford_comma_list($list, $type = 'and', $oxford = TRUE) {
  $final_join = " $type ";
  if ($oxford && count($list) > 2) {
    $final_join = ',' . $final_join;
  }
  $final = array_splice($list, -2, 2); 
  $final_string = implode($final_join, $final);
  array_push($list, $final_string);
  return implode(', ', $list);
}

Now the real question: how would you make this translatable?

Using Constants For Permission Names: WHY?

By joachim, Wed, 06/30/2010 - 14:19

I keep seeing this sort of thing in so many modules:

define("MY_MODULE_PERM_ACCESS_WIDGETS", 'access widgets');
// Names changed to protect the guilty ;)

Am I missing something, or is this utterly pointless?

The only advantage I see is that you can change the permission string later on. But you actually can't change a permission string once you've made a release without an almighty amount of work in a hook_update_N()[*] to migrate users' existing permissions, so what is the point of using a constant apart from just creating shouty caps noise?

[*] Is there a helper function in core yet for migrating permission names during updates? There really should be.

Once & Only Once: The Conversion To Drupal 7's FieldAPI

By joachim, Tue, 04/06/2010 - 14:06

I'm not a fan of repeating myself, or of doing the same work twice. So when I first got a look at FieldAPI back at DrupalCon Paris, my thought after 'Wow this is going to change everything,' was 'Every module that converts its custom data storage to this is going to be doing the same work, over and over'.

It seemed to me that we have a lot of modules that add things to stuff. The examples that spring to mind include Taxonomy image (add an image to a taxonomy term), Comment upload (add an uploaded file to a comment), User terms (you get the picture), and the daddy of them all, Image (which now we must call Image Oldskool, due to there being a shiny new Image module in Core).

What all these have in common is that on Drupal 7 their things-to-stuffness would be perfectly served by FieldAPI. Users get more flexibility, an expanding universe of formatters and widgets; module maintainers can write less code and in some cases even hang up their hats on a particular project as it can live entirely in configuration space. Everyone wins. But how to get there?

This matter has been bubbling at the back of my mind ever since Paris. On the one hand I could sort of see how this could be all done with a single framework: you tell it what sort of entity you are dealing with (node, comment, term), which bundle (article, page, which vocab), what your fields are, and how to load the old data. The framework creates the fields for you, then runs a batch to load each object, moves values around in clever ways that you don't need to worry about, and then saves the object. Banzai! Your data is now saved in a field.

On the other hand, this was clearly crack. Of the highest order.

And yet it works. It quite possibly still is crack, and some extra pairs of eyes to de-crackify it would be very welcome. But I can confirm that I've run data conversions on both User terms and oldskool Image nodes, and got term fields on my users and beautiful image fields on my nodes.

There remains some work to be done: I'd like to make conversion to file and image fields a bit more straightforward and create a nice way to specify how to populate the alt and title fields for images. And all this is largely academic and has only run on D7 databases with dummy D6 tables imported, since core's 6 to 7 upgrade process is not currently working. So I could use a hand. And if you have a things-to-stuff module, get in touch and give it a whirl.

Help needed: using jQuery to show passwords as you type

By joachim, Sun, 03/21/2010 - 20:57

Today I found an article about password usability, which suggested that showing users what they type for their passwords is an improvement to usability.

You can try a working demo, which adds a 'show password' checkbox.

This had me wondering whether this is a feature we should consider having in Drupal.

I duly began writing a small module to do this, but I'm stuck on rewriting the Javascript from the article as well-formed Drupal-friendly jQuery. Now I can make jQuery do fancy things like expand things you click on and whizz things around, and my code so far replaces the password element with the new one, but making that new element itself clickable has me stumped: it's all a bit too meta.

I know when I'm beaten, so I'm blogging this to say: is there a jQuery whizz out there who would care to lend a hand? If so, please comment or email me, and let's make a new contrib module for this!