Joachim's blog

The Oxford Comma

Submitted by joachim on Wed, 2010/06/30 - 16:59

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?

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Using Constants For Permission Names: WHY?

Submitted by joachim on Wed, 2010/06/30 - 15:19

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.

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

Submitted by joachim on Tue, 2010/04/06 - 15:06

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.

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Help needed: using jQuery to show passwords as you type

Submitted by joachim on Sun, 2010/03/21 - 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!

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Getting Stuff Done

Submitted by joachim on Tue, 2010/02/16 - 17:07

Basically, an initial patch went in, we opened followup issues for cleanup, the followup issues never got followed up, so what's in HEAD is a bit of a mess. — catch, in a recent issue comment

This happens far too often. I'm not linking to the specific issue in the Drupal 7 queue because I don't want to point fingers; this suffices to exemplify my point.

I wasn't anywhere near the sausage factory back when Drupal 6 was coming out, so I've no idea if this is a problem that's getting worse, but I feel this is a problem that happens a lot, and that it needs to happen a lot less.

I think that our move to distributed version control may help, as we can leave new developments on a branch until everything is cleaned up (and documented!), but as everyone knows, technological solutions are no substitute for good communication and organization.

Ultimately, we need people to take on the roles of roadmappers and project managers.

This is apparently a dirty word; there is a widespread notion that you can't organize volunteers. I can with confidence state that this is utter rubbish, because I've done it, and volunteer organizations around the world do it.

It's maybe harder because it's online rather than face to face (we do it fairly well at code sprints, after all), and maybe harder because we're mostly a bunch of fairly headstrong smart people who are used to managing our own activities (which is one of the things that makes us good programmers). But we clearly recognize the need to be organized on a smaller scale, and the need to work with rules. Managing Core is going to be a mammoth task, of which we are right to be apprehensive, but is it so different to what we already do?

Regardless, it is necessary, and I think we are also of necessity often pragmatists. This is one occasion we need to recognize the need for some medicine that in some cases might not be entirely to our palate.

Spoonful of sugar anyone?

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