Blogs from the Labs

Form validation - what makes sense?

by Domenic Santangelo Published: November 19th, 2008
Tagged: forms, regex, validation

We just had an impromptu conversation over here about validating phone numbers that morphed into validating email addresses and more.

Adam brought up the fact there are a lot of email addresses that don’t pass the basic regex validation that a lot of sites use. In fact, there was a good discussion of this very issue on Slashdot in a larger article on regexes. One comment:  read more »

As most of you might know, Ubercart is chock full of AJAX, jQuery, and Special Sauce that both helps users along and also keeps them safe. One of those safety features is a nice little security check function which erases the credit card information on the Checkout Review page (cart/checkout/review) should a user's browser be refreshed. If a refresh occurs, the user gets redirected back to the cart/checkout page and must re-input their credit card information and then re-submit the form in order to get back to the Checkout Review page again.

This, as you might have guessed, is *really* not themer-friendly.  read more »

Komodo 5 sluggishness in OSX

by Domenic Santangelo Published: November 17th, 2008
Tagged: ActiveState, IDE, Komodo, php, slow

Komodo is a great cross-platform IDE. But I’ve noticed that as file size increases, Komodo’s performance slows to a crawl, becoming practically unusable once files hit 2.5k lines or so.

I opened a thread about it on ActiveState’s community site (which happens to be running Drupal!). It seems this is a known issue on OSX and they’re looking into it.  read more »

When users control the conversation, there is an interesting tendency for the elevation of users as experts based on contribution. If there is one thing I've learned about the Drupal community over the years, and in my years working around and in Open Source communities for years before that, it's this: contribution and presence are the basis of community capital; or, in short: contribution is social capital.  read more »

San Diego DUG is upon up again!

by Joel Farris Published: November 11th, 2008
Tagged: Drupal, DUG

Yes, the San Diego Drupal User Group meeting is upon us yet again. This month, we’re meeting at Platt College on Wednesday night the 12th of November.

The topic of this meeting will be…Lightning talks! Unless Harry’s concocted another badass presentation that I don’t know about, we’ll be doing a round of lightning talks, followed by a group discussion of the topic that interested you most during the talks.  read more »

Deane Barker at Gadgetopia asked about how to access the content access APIs for different CMSs. He emailed me to find out if I might be able provide an example for Drupal.

If I get a list of content IDs, I should be able to “strain” them through some API call on the CMS, and get back a list of IDs the current user is allowed to see.

What if you could say —

Hey, CMS, I have this list of content IDs here… How did I get them? Yeah, well, that’s not that important right now…  read more »

It’s super annoying when you’re looking for a string in your code, so you do a recursive grep, only to get a ton of matches within svn’s “.svn” directories.

Here’s a solution:

Inside your ~/.bash_profile, insert this line:

alias rgrep="find . -follow ( -name ".svn" ) -prune -o -print | xargs grep -Hn"

Save it, then log out and back in.

Now instead of grep -ir "sprintf" *, do rgrep sprintf. Cake!

We’re not headed to DrupalCon DC until next March, but it’s already causing a lot of buzz around WorkHabit this week as we make plans, submit our talks, and watch and wait through the voting process.  read more »

Patch testing for Drupal 7

by Joel Farris Published: October 24th, 2008
Tagged: Drupal

This year at Drupalcon DC, I'll be doing a session on Patch Testing for Drupal 7. It's long been a premise of mine that patch testing is really fun once you get the hang of it, it's just too hard to learn how the Drupalistas want it done!

Fear no more. I'll make it easy for ya. Come see me at my Drupalcon Patch Testing session and I shall outline a process whereby anyone can download a patch file, install it, figure out what it does, and report the results in a meaningful manner.  read more »

Whiteboards everywhere

by Adam Kalsey Published: October 24th, 2008
Tagged: construction, office, whiteboards

We just got finished installing floor to ceiling whiteboards around some of the offices and common spaces in the Sacramento office. Here's how you can do it without spending thousands of dollars on large whiteboards.

Whiteboards  read more »