Drupal

Changing Drupal 7's built-in jQuery UI theme

Samat Jain — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 05:08:45 +0000

jQuery UI, a Javascript widget framework built upon jQuery, comes built-in Drupal 7 core. One of jQuery UI’s nicer features is that you can switch themes by changing out a CSS file.

There are some nice jQuery UI themes out there (unfortunately, not enough!), like Tait Brown’s port of Aristo to jQuery UI (see demo).

But since jQuery UI is in Drupal core, which internally keeps track of CSS files, how do you switch the jQuery UI theme in use?

The Seven theme, including with Drupal core, provides inspiration on the “one true Drupal way” of doing this, by providing hook_css_alter(). Place into your theme’s template.php:

function MYTHEME_css_alter(&$css) {
  if (isset($css['misc/ui/jquery.ui.theme.css'])) {
    $css['misc/ui/jquery.ui.theme.css']['data'] = drupal_get_path('theme', 'MYTHEME') . '/jquery.ui.theme.css';
  }
}

Replace “MYTHEME” with the name of your theme, and adjust the path to your jQuery UI theme’s CSS file accordingly (the above assumes you place jquery.ui.theme.css in the root folder of your theme).

With this magic in hand, I now have the Aristo jQuery UI theme running on this blog. Looks quite a bit better!

This post was inspired by an answer I posted on StackExchange.

Topic:

jQuery

Drupal

BrowserID session API support for Drupal

Samat Jain — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 12:55:47 +0000

Late last week, Mozilla’s Identity team made available a Firefox extension for BrowserID, a new browser-oriented single-sign on mechanism. Click a button in your address bar and automagically login into a website.

Along with it they made available a browser session API—that is, the browser can now keep track and show whether you’re logged in, logged out, etc, also displayed in your address bar.

Drupal had a BrowserID module less than 24 hours after BrowserID’s initial announcement (thanks Isaac Sukin!). Likewise, in the weekend after the session API announcement I helped out and wrote a patch adding support for the new API.

If you’re familiar with Drupal development, install the Drupal module, ~~apply the patch,~~ install the Firefox add-on, and get browser-integrated, one-click login to your Drupal-powered website.

The patched module is running live on this site right now, so please play with it (myfavoritebeer.org does get boring).

At the moment, Drupal’s BrowserID module does not create an account on my blog, so you must do that first, separately. Create an account here, or if you’ve an OpenID, logon with your OpenID directly to also create an account (funny how complicated this has gotten already). Make sure to set and use the same e-mail address as the one you use for your BrowserID. After creating an account, logout, and then log back in using your BrowserID. If you’ve problems/find a bug, please leave comments on the Drupal bug or this blog post—thanks!

[UPDATE: 16 Aug 2010]: Drupal’s BrowserID module now includes my patch; you don’t need to download and apply the patch separately.

Topic:

Firefox

Drupal

BrowserID

Taking Drupal sites offline via mysql and the command line

Samat Jain — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 05:42:10 +0000

Drupal-powered websites can be put into an “offline mode.” This is much better than most alternatives (such as taking the web server offline), especially for search engines, as the message and HTTP status codes given to users and robots alike will tell them to patiently come back later.

I’ve found that putting the site into offline mode makes database backups go much faster on heavily trafficked sites (which is obvious). However, for a particular site I was working with, this needed to be done in an automated manner, and on a dedicated database server that did not have access to the Drupal installation.

Most people take their Drupal sites offline through Drupal’s web-based administration interface. They can also be put offline through the Drupal Shell. Neither were suitable for me: the former cannot be automated easily, and the latter requires access to the Drupal installation. Fortunately, Drupal sites can easily be taken offline by setting things in the database, which can easily be done via bash scripts and the command-line MySQL client.

Given your database user is my_db_user, password my_password, and database my_drupal_db, the backup script would look something similar to:

 #!/bin/bash

# Take site offline
mysql --user my_db_user --password=my_password my_drupal_db << EOF
UPDATE variable SET value='s:1:"1";' WHERE name = 'site_offline';
DELETE FROM cache WHERE CID = 'variables'; EOF

# Do stuff here while the site is offline (e.g. backup)

# Bring site online
mysql --user my_db_user --password=my_password my_drupal_db << EOF
UPDATE variable SET value='s:1:"0";' WHERE name = 'site_offline';
DELETE FROM cache WHERE CID = 'variables';
EOF

Update: The original version of this article had some problems on some setups with the variables table being cached. I added another SQL statement to make sure this cache is flushed so the site actually reflects its configuration.

Update: This method really doesn’t work that well, and the more I think about it, there isn’t a way to get around writing something that interacts with Drupal. I’m working on a script that will be more fool-proof.

Topic:

Linux

Drupal

Bash Shell

Amazon A9's siteinfo.xml: almost a repeat of favicon.ico

Samat Jain — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 11:47:42 +0000

Recently, I’ve received a few error 404s on a request for “siteinfo.xml.” siteinfo.xml is a file used by Amazon’s A9 search engine’s browser toolbar SiteInfo, and is automatically fetched for every website a user visits.

This sounds pretty similar to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer’s infamous favorites icons feature. For every site a user visited with Internet Explorer, the browser would automatically request a file called favicon.ico, to be displayed in the browser’s location bar and bookmarks. A lot of people were not happy–all of the sudden web servers would begin to get swamped for requests for this mysterious favicon.ico that did not exist. These requests polluted many web server logs, and were very annoying.

On some sites, especially dynamic ones, 404 errors are very expensive. Unfortunately this is true of most Drupal-powered sites, including mine. When using Drupal’s “pretty URLs” which uses Apache’s mod_rewrite to, well, make URLs pretty, all requests that the web server does not process (including errors) will go through Drupal. Going through Drupal means a long boot-strapping process to initialize Drupal and load all its modules, and at least one database request to find out a URL does not exist and to return an error 404. Too many requests for a non-existent file can basically become a DoS attack.

It seems Amazon’s A9 developers didn’t get the memo people don’t like tools that request files that don’t exist.

Granted, it’s not too bad: I don’t think this toolbar has much market penetration, so it’s not as if millions of people are killing my site. The siteinfo.xml specification page also mentions that the file is fetched through A9 and cached, so the file will not be requested for every user that visits, but only for the first one.

Kudos for Amazon’s programmers being a bit brighter than Microsoft’s, but eh, I can’t say how much more bright for designing a system that is a bit too similar to the favicon.ico debacle.

Topic:

Drupal

Microsoft

Web 2.0

A take on Drupal's taxonomy system from the Plone/Python camp

Samat Jain — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 10:23:13 +0000

Over at the Plone Blog is the article Death and Taxonomies; it reviews Drupal’s taxonomy (aka category) system.

The author basically comes to the conclusion I have, a conclusion that is shared by many in the Drupal community but not so much outside of it: Drupal’s taxonomy system is amazing.

For most people and their uses, it is completely overengineered and complicated to use. This fits into Drupal’s marketing stance that it is a content management framework rather than just a CMS. It is very generic, and with some custom programming can be adapted to anything–the possibilities are limitless. With many web development projects (that I don’t want to write in PHP) I think about, I wish I had the facility of Drupal’s taxonomy system.

Of course, there are problems, which the review goes into: there are too many hierarchal relationships in Drupal, all competing with each other. There is the menu system, the book module, and hierarchal taxonomies. The key to being a Drupal master is know when to use which and how to use them, something I’ve definitely not mastered. And that is part of the problem–why should you need to?

Topic:

Python

Drupal

Percentage-relative vs em-relative layouts and Sands

Samat Jain — Wed, 31 May 2006 02:25:53 +0000

I’ve outlined some of the design decisions I made when designing Sands, including why some links are black, the use of a em-relative layout, and why I think they are more usable, in a post on Drupal’s forums: Any theme with high usability?

Topic:

Drupal

Upgrading samat.org to Drupal 4.7

Samat Jain — Thu, 11 May 2006 08:21:26 +0000

I’m in the process of upgrading this site to Drupal 4.7. Expect a lot to be broken, especially links. Please let me know if you find any problems!

Some changes:

Conversion of Topics taxonomy from a hierarchal taxonomy to a flat, free-tagging taxonomy.

I previously had the “Topics” taxonomy as a hierarchal tree, for example, CentOS would be under Linux. It looked like a good idea before I started to use it, but Drupal and hierarchies don’t work as well as I’d like… I converted it to a flat list, and then turned it into a Drupal 4.7 free-tagging taxonomy. Hopefully this will lead to better tagging of my posts.

Modiying page URLs to end in *.html.

I don’t need to do this, but I want to. It looks nicer, it makes pages easier to save, and it facilitates moving to another CMS if the need ever arises. For many URLs I’ve used permanent redirects to prevent old links from breaking.

Topic:

Drupal

Site

Sands and Sands_CSS

Samat Jain — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 01:21:00 +0000

Sands is an attempt to create an all-purpose, drop-in replacement, "generic" theme like Bluemarine. It has design attributes taken from Drupal.org's proprietary Bluebeach theme and friendselectric.

Some features:

Topic:

Drupal

New versions of Sands available, in two different distributions

Samat Jain — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 22:57:21 +0000

I’ve taken my Drupal theme Sands and split it up into two different distributions/versions: one that uses tables for layout (will continue to be called Sands) and one that uses CSS (to be Sands_CSS).

Basically, they are the exact same thing, except a different columns.css and page.tpl.php file.

Drupal’s 4.6 use of the tag triggers strange bugs in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer when using some CSS-column layouts, like the one Sands uses. Splitting into two different themes was the only course of action: though, now that Drupal 4.7 does not use this tag and the bugs no longer occur, it may be a little late in doing this… Oh well.

You can read more about Sands on the page on this site, or through Drupal’s project pages for Sands and Sands_CSS.

Topic:

Drupal

Drupal themes section moved

Samat Jain — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 09:11:32 +0000

I’ve moved my Sands theme to a new location, at samat.org/drupal-themes/sands. The URL is nicer and shorter, and sets me up for the other Drupal themes I would like to create.

Topic:

Drupal

Site

My Drupal Themes

Samat Jain — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 08:30:15 +0000

Topic:

Drupal

Adding Silk Icons to the Sands theme

Samat Jain — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 13:15:19 +0000

For those who visit this site for my Drupal Sands theme, yes, I am adding Mark James’ Silk CMS icons to the theme. All it required was some little PHPTemplate hacks and some CSS. I’m planning on releasing this version of Sands with Drupal 4.7.

In case you don’t like the icons, you’ll be able to remove them with the deletion of a single line in a single CSS file.

Topic:

Drupal

Working on a new Drupal theme...

Samat Jain — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 06:21:00 +0000

I am getting tired of the Drupal theme selection currently available. The move to PHPTemplate (as well as the the Drupal Themegarden outage) has left few good templates.

Bluemarine… I don’t know. I hate the way it’s low contrast.

I’ve disabled my site’s usual theme and am developing the new one, based off of Bluemarine for PHPTemplate from CVS.

Things I am focusing on:

Making certain elements look nicer and more modern, for example: comments, node information, etc
Correctly used relative font sizes (my MAJOR peeve with many themes: I know how to configure my web browser, I want 1em fonts for content text)
Revamp colors such that text is high-contrast with muted background colors
Separate in CSS page layout from things meant to be customized, like colors, link styles, etc
Underlined links with discernable link colors

If you’ve any comments on how things should look, please let me know.

Topic:

Software

Drupal

Conversion to Drupal

Samat Jain — Fri, 20 May 2005 05:02:00 +0000

I’m converting this website over to Drupal. It’s just too slick compared to my old hand-written weblog system and use of ErfurtWiki.

The old site is still available at old.tamasrepus.hotnudiegirls.com, which I will kill once I’ve migrated all my content over.

Topic:

Drupal

Site