Drupal Tutorials

How Do You Teach Drupal Without Inducing Confusion/Boredom Triggered Comas? Here's a rule that has never let me down:

Never interact with the drupal site in any way during a lesson

The person you teach needs to click on every menu link, fill out every form, and as they learn, its your job to start taking off the training wheels. At first, you'll have to point them to where to go to add a new taxonomy term, but make it a point to later ask them to add a taxonomy term, and see if they remember how to find it.

This "hack" works well for two reasons:

The hardest part about using drupal's javascript features is knowing where to begin: they remained an arcane mystery to me until today. After drinking a bit of whiskey, and studying how core was using Drupal.behavior, I learned it couldn't be simpler. If you don't know how to do this, take a moment:

I reviewed 5 WYSIWYG editor modules for drupal 6: FCKEditor, TinyMCE, WYMeditor, jwysiwyg, HTMLBox. The latter three aren't yet mature, so I saved the in depth reviews for the big guys, tinyMCE and FCKeditor. Truth be told, I decided to have low expectations, and rated these modules against the following:

Lets say you're building a drupal website for Bill's Widget Company. You create a custom theme, and a custom module. Now lets also say you are as dumb as me, and decided to name both your theme and module the same thing: bwc. Its a small mistake you'd never make if you thought for a second: "Should my module and theme share the same drupal namespace?" It sounds dangerous, even if you don't know why. Here's why it is dangerous:

If there is one thing I hate more than breath and martial arts (all kinds...), its writing copy within a php array. So for a recent project that required text-heavy forms, and a bunch of emails, I created an element that mimics php template. The usage and theme function are rather simple: (and rather stolen from phptemplate_render().

Today, I was working with drupal 6's AHAH form elements. Initially, I was delighted at how well they worked. That delight turned to confusion once I realized that the form elements I had put in the menu callback of the #ahah['path'] was missing its name attribute. After doing a bit of research in how the poll module handled the formapi voodoo, I created a generalized function to aid in building AHAH callbacks. If there is a better way to do this, I wasn't able to find it. <?php

On the #drupal IRC channel, Excallibur points out that there are no coding standards for CSS. I'd like to propose some straightforward ones.

Note that I am not intentionally omitting indentation within rules, but am having trouble with my code filter.