Manal and Alaa's bit bucket

The address module in Drupal's E-Commerce suite does not allow users that are not registered (anonymous users) to complete the checkout and payment. Thiscan cause loss of business due to users not wanting to register.

There has been bugs filed against this, such as: 37220 Anonymous purchases, with patches.

Since not everyone is able to apply patches, I am attaching a pre-patched version of the address.module for 4.6, as a zip file. 

The Linkpoint API module is part of the contributed set of modules for Drupal's E-Commerce suite.

It was originally written as a quick and dirty hack to the Authorize.net module. As time passed by, E-Commerce APIs changed, and the Linkpoint API module no longer worked.

Recently, a client wanted to use that module, and it did not work. So, I modified it to work again, and behave properly. The nice thing is that test mode also works. Comes in handy for testing before going live.

The changes are back in the repository, after checking with Gordon Heydon, E-Commerce maintainer. 

While doing a site with lots of custom node types for a client, I decided to isolate some features into a generic and reusable module, and the favorite nodes module was born.

This is a relatively straight forward module. The admin chooses which node types to enable favorites for, and users with the correct permissions see a link saying "add to favorites" at the bottom of the node. When they click that link, the node is added to a list of their favorites.

Due to some change of plans, things turned out for the better, and I will be travelling to Vancouver, British Columbia to attend the Open Source Content Management System Summit (OSCMS-Summit), which is mainly a Drupal event, but with other CMS sessions peppered in.

This will be my first time in Vancouver. I wish it was in some better season though, and I could take the whole family there.

Anyone up for fishing? I know it is not a geek thing, but ...

Sami Khan's DrupalShowCase.com has been operating for a while, but only today did I notice that he has something to say about Baheyeldin.com.

He says:

Khalid is a Drupal module developer and works in general on the Drupal content management system. He's brought Drupal many great modules including the AdSense module and the nodevote module.

Here is another web application framework written in PHP.

WASP is a "powerful web application framework built on PHP5". It is object oriented, and strives to be suitable for enterprise class applications with less code.

What is interesting is that  WASP uses Drupal to power its site. 

Resources

•  ONLamp article on WASP.

Robin Miller is an author and columnist on technology whose writings appears regularly on Slashdot and Newsforge.

His blog runs Drupal at roblimo.com. Plain vanilla BlueMarine theme look.

Some sites like to run as an outsourced service. For example, a payment service, a support ticket system, or an event registration is not something every site wants to run. As a solution, they want to pay some other specialized site for this service.

Let us say that Widgets Inc wants a support ticketing system, and contracts Support Corp to do this service over the web for its clients. Support Corp's site wants users who come from Widgets Inc's site to have the same branding and look and feel as Widgets Inc's site.

At the same time, Support Corp has been contracted by other companies like ACME, Sprockets, ...etc. Each company wants Support Corp's web site to look like its own web site for its own clients.

This is both good and bad news to web site developers and theme designers.

Many of us have read the phrase: "First impressions are the most lasting" on fortune cookies in Chinese restaurants, or heard it elsewhere. While it seems unfair to judge a book by its cover in a second or two, research shows that humans mentally rate web site by their looks in less than half a second, and often less than that.The research is by Gitte Lindgaard of The Human Oriented Technology Lab in  Carleton University here in Ottawa, Ontario.

A client recently commissioned a user referral module whereby an existing user of a site can refer another user and get some sort of credit for it.

The module is conceptually similar to the affiliate module, but instead of a "site-to-user" model, it is a "user-to-user" model.

Users in designated roles have a referral link that others can click on to register to the site. Once the new user registers, a database link is recorded as to which user referred them.

If the user points is installed, the referring user is credited with a certain number of points. If Adsense with revenue sharing is installed, an admin assigned percentage of page views for nodes created by the new user is assigned to the referring user.

Well, some of you may have noticed that my blog was down for several days now. Even google cached the error message displayed by server.

I fixed it my self. Well, this comes as a development as I have always feared to learn MySQL administration and considering it something very alien to me. Well after a few minutes of googling I found that I had to drop the cache table as it was corrupt and recreate it. This post helped me recreate it. Later on i discovered that I only need to use the command truncate table cache;.

Well, some of you may have noticed that my blog was down for several days now. Even google cached the error message displayed by server.

I fixed it my self. Well, this comes as a development as I have always feared to learn MySQL administration and considering it something very alien to me. Well after a few minutes of googling I found that I had to drop the cache table as it was corrupt and recreate it. This post helped me recreate it. Later on i discovered that I only need to use the command truncate table cache;.

Exactly one month ago, I posted on how many sites run Drupal. My estimate using "node/feed" in Google yielded 54,000.

Today, the same query shows 58,400.

Is it plausible to have 4,400 new Drupal sites in one month?

Bloggerparty.com launched yesterday. They use Drupal, the Adsense module I wrote, and the new revenue sharing features that were recently sponsored by Bloggerparty.

Brenda, the owner of BloggerParty, is elated with the success so far, in just two days. Read about it on her post on the first day.

On a recent post on Drupal.org, a few people were asking for the devel module for 4.6. I don't understand why it is not branched with every release, and let for those who need it. 

Anyway, since I happen to have a copy of the 4.6 module, I am attaching it here. 

Enjoy ... 

The user points module has been updated for Drupal 4.7.

Get it from the Drupal.org project page. 

The Drupal  Adsense module has been updated to allow revenue sharing.

Some technical details for the curious:

• The site admin can assign a certain percentage of ad views to be assigned to  the node author's Google AdSense client ID.
• The node  types are also configurable, so the admin can only enable it for specific node types (e.g. blogs).
• The revenue sharing only  applies to the full node view, not the teasers. These go to "the house" (i.e. the site assigned Adsense client  ID).
• The path /blog/uid also has revenue sharing enabled.
• A specifically named profile field has to be filled in by the user to get credited with the ads.
• When revenue sharing is enabled, adsense caching is disabled.
• The percentage is determined based on a random number generator. So it is basically tossing dice from 1 to 100, and seeing if this page view should be awarded to the author or the site. I did this so that I dont have to keep a running total in the database, which would slow things down.

Benefits

This is a great community building tool.

In the Drupal Predictions for 2006 thread, I predicted that both Slashdot.org and Digg.com will move to Drupal, mostly tongue in cheek.

For those who do not know, both are really high volume technology news and discussion oriented sites. If/when they adopt Drupal as a platform, it would seriously demonstrate Drupal's performance under heavy loads.

Alex Racine said that Digg already runs Drupal.

A few months ago, Boris Mann posted a call to arms of sorts on Drupal.org for search engine ranking for several keywords and phrases, my favorite being: Drupal, the Best Open Source PHP MySQL CMS there is.

Today, it occured to me to search Google for "the best CMS", and found that the fourth result was the Drupal.org news about Sir Tim Berners Lee uses Drupal as a blog. When searching for "the best php mysql cms", the above link comes out as the fifth.

After completely forgetting about it, the Google Summer of Code T-Shirt has finally arrived. I participated as a code review  mentor for Drupal on three student project.

The modules I reviewed were Angela Byron's Quiz module, Fabiano Sant'Ana's WebDAV module, and Matthew Loar's Google Site Map module.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has a blog at MIT, and it runs on Drupal. For those who do not know him, he was the inventor of the World Wide Web back in the early 1990s.

The site's theme is a modified form of the SpreadFireFox theme, by Chris Messina, which I ported from 4.4 to 4.5 and 4.6. Too bad Chris has no time to keep working on this theme. So much potential, and  lots of attention to detail...

It is always a challenge to make software and computing in general do Arabic (and other languages that are Right to Left and uses variable shape letters).

Regarding the internet, I wrote several articles about Arabic on the Internet with a lot of background information, technical challenges, state of the market, and more.

As far as Drupal is concerned, you can read my article on the various possible approaches for the Arabization of Drupal.

This authentication backend'll enable your DokuWiki to authenticate using the drupal database.
This code is pulled from my cvs which means that whenever I update it, It'll reflect the file displayed here ;-)
<?php
/**
* Drupal authentication backend
*
* Use drupal as an authentication backend.
*
* @license    GPL 2 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html)
* @author     Mohammed Sameer <msameer@foolab.org>
*/

// TODO: Currently, Each time we have to connct to the db twice, one to auth the

The custom error module for Drupal has been upgraded for the new 4.7 Form API. Thanks to Markus Petrux for provided a patch.

Most bloggers need to urge visitors to add their syndicate to visitors' feedreaders. As online feedreaders is more available now and popularly used by readers, it preferable to add a block that make subscription to your blog easier for those users.

Here below, find a table of almost all online feedreaders names, links to add your syndication to their users and image link used.

The Drupal Adsense module has been updated to work with the upcoming 4.7 version of Drupal.

While you are here, make sure you check the Google Adsense resources for Drupal for tips, hints, and more. 

This update was sponsored by Scribendi.

In a comment on a previous post, Marco pointed out to a page on his site were he used Google searching to uncover Drupal sites on the web based on two criteria.

In early November 2005, he found 54,700 Drupal sites based on this search. See his Drupal.org post on this. This same search today says that there are 60,700 sites. 

Darrel O'Pry posted this gem on the Drupal Themes mailing list, and it deserves to be publicized.

Paste this in your page.tpl.php below the <body> tag, to see what functions are available for you, the theme developer.

  <ul>
  <?php
    $functions = get_defined_functions();
    foreach($functions['user'] as $function) :
      print "<li>$function</li>";
    endforeach;
  ?>
  </ul>

Similarly, one can use the get_defined_vars() and get_defined_constants() to see what variables are available.

In a recent article, I stated that the latest adsense.module has integrated section targeting.

Today, I explain how to modify your theme so that section targeting applies to comments as well.

I am assuming that you will be using a phptemplate based theme.

What you need is  to modify the comment.tpl.php for your theme. This should look something like  this:

 <div class="comment">
 <?php if ($picture) : ?>
  <?php print $picture; ?>
 <?php endif; ?>
 <h3 class="title"><?php print $title; ?></h3>
 <?php if ($new != '') : ?>
  <span class="new"><?php print $new; ?></span>
 <?php endif; ?>
 <div class="submitted"><?php print $submitted; ?></div>
 <div class="content"><?php print $content; ?></div>
 <div class="links">&raquo; <?php print $links; ?></div>
</div>

What you need to do is wrap the content part in the section tags, like so: