monline

In Drupal 5 you can control the visibility of each block by specifying a rule (allow all except ..., allow only ..., or use user submitted PHP code to evaluate the pattern) and a pattern on the URL. However this does not only control the visibility (show or hide) of the block, but controls whether the block is rendered (ie. the code of the block executed) at all or not. Of course this means a huge difference in performance.

This article at Lullabot is not quite up-to-date, but gives you a general idea on how to achieve the goal. With some extra work you can have collections, sets, fancy slideshows (etc.) too.

There's already a Drupal module for this purpose called userlink (actually there're more such modules), but I had a few problems with it:

• it did not allow selection and apply of input filters on the description
• I could not control the number of items included in the "Recent Links" block

Actually you can build the same functionality without the above restrictions using a couple of other modules and keep more options open at the same time.

Drupal is the open source (GPLv2) content management system (CMS) of my choice. It's very well written (nice internal structure imho) and is pretty amazing in its modularity/extendibility. Initially it seemed as a late starter (since a lot of other similiar software already existed for years), but nowadays it has caught up with the competition. I've already used it for my blog and a number of company websites, newsportals, etc. It's not the perfect out-of-the-box solution for every purpose, but it's a PHP portal developer's dream.

The jQuery included in Drupal 5.7 (the current 5.x release) is v1.0.4 in compressed (packed) format.

I've found a number of interesting tagclouds at Dries Buytaert's website. I've recreated the code (mainly the SQL queries) needed to reproduce the same clouds using the Tagadelic Drupal module. Take a look at them, if you're interested.

I was happy to see that the jQuery website (or at least the plugins section) uses Drupal. But this is not what I'm writing about right now. I was looking for a nice looking slideshow or gallery viewer jQuery plugin to use in one of my company's projects. We already decided that the albums will be handled by the Acidfree Drupal module, but needed a pretty UI for displaying the images. You can search for such jQuery plugins using the advanced search on the plugins page. Restrict the search to type=plugin and enter the keywords "slideshow" and "gallery" into the "Containing any of the words" field. I specially liked Galleria (which is a very good looking gallery/album viewer) and the Cycle plugin (which is a tookit that allows you to easily create fancy slideshows, album viewers or whatever you want).

I've tested the Notify module for use with comment moderation queues, but unfortunately it does not send emails for such comments. You get only notification on comments that are added without a moderator's approval. You don't get notification for comments that go into the moderation queue and you don't get notification either when they are approved.

I've just read over at drupal.org that Gábor Hojtsy (he was/is the major guy behind the Hungarian Drupal localization) has been promoted to a core developer of Drupal raising the number of core developers from 4 to 5. Good job Gábor and thanks for your efforts!

Strange. Somewhere around the 1/4th of the coding standards of Drupal you can find a note on why the final ?> should be omitted from all code files (modules, includes, etc.). However I just checked all the user contributed modules on my site and 90% of them did not follow this. But every core Drupal module did! It seems only a handful of developers make the effort to comply with the coding standards ... otherwise they would have read them. :->