my blog

I am a big fan of the Thickbox jQuery plugin. A slick alternative to this is the Lightbox 2 javascript library which looks pretty easy to integrate into we sites. I was impressed to discover that there is even a Drupal Module for this library, Lightbox V2. I thought I would write one but someone beat me to it! 

The Drupal project is superb. It has a fantastic stable core CMS and an overwhelming number of contributed modules, themes and community powered documntation system. It is all too easy for commercial organisations to visit, download and go away having never really put anything back into the community.The pressures of daily deadlines, the boss who doesn't quite get the whole open sourse ethos, whatever the reason some companies just don't put back.So how can you contribute to the cause. Well why not follow some of these suggestions

Nightmare of nightmares, you have forgotten your user 1 account login for your Drupal Site, and for some reason the password retrieval just will not work. How do you get back into your site administration? If you have database access, the answer is simple.

update users set pass=md5('PASS') where uid = 1;

This sets your user 1 password to PASS .

I stumbled accross this guide to Drupal Theming today. You do have to register with the site and wait, but the document is good.

Insert this code into your template.php in your theme and you gain control over which fields are editable using TINYMCE

function phptemplate_tinymce_theme($init, $textarea_name, $theme_name, $is_running) {
switch ($textarea_name) {
// Disable tinymce for these textareas
case 'log': // book and page log
case 'img_assist_pages':
case 'caption': // signature
case 'pages':
case 'access_pages': //TinyMCE profile settings.
case 'user_mail_welcome_body': // user config settings
case 'user_mail_approval_body': // user config settings

My brother in law has just launched his new web site at www.sdmarchitectural.co.uk he has an architectural practice serving Cheshire, specifically Warrington and outlying areas.

I have been hunting aroudn for an xml powered flash charting tool so that I can present data stored in Drupal graphically. Maani.us have an excellent xml based swf charting tool which is highly configurable based on changing an xml file. The site has a lot of examples with the code behind them so it is easy to pick up.

There is an assumption these days that Google is the only search engine. However, it is not. There are some good alternatives, one I stumbled accross today is vivisimo.com which I found to be very useful in that you can browse categories once you have done a search.

Robert Douglas talks about strategies for Caching in the Drupal CMS.