The Modular Company (TMC)

There are not many spots where you can substitute varnish for squid, if it weren't for the weird names open source coders give to their pet projects then the internet would be no different.

I think that wherever there is a large enough monoculture of some sort there will be an automatic attraction for spammers and other miscreants to peddle their wares.

The rationale behind this is that as soon as the cost of reaching people goes down the incentive for a spammer to abuse the system will go up. So any kind of place that allows a uniform way to reach a large number of users through automated forms submission, search engine spamming or protocols (such as email) that spam is inevitable.

Something strange happened on this TMC site. I can not add cases anymore and the case-tracker is not visible anymore.
I am sure I didn't changed this because I can't login as administrator here.

Today i added some content to diyfiles.com in total 6 new diy projects
The new projects are toys, home and garden and transportation.
New ideas and content are welcome.

After a long long (very long!) phonecall with Joyce yesterday where I tried to put my frustrations about the drupal way into words today I decided to take a different approach.

I'm so concerned with the performance of the smaller sites because any one of them has the potential to grow that I am afraid that if one of them does take off that we'd have to rebuild the whole thing without drupal in order to be able to achieve adequate performance. Clearly that would suck :)

There are lots of days when I'm happy with drupal, but today was not one of them.

The last couple of days have been an uphill battle to get the data from the old autotagger databases imported into drupal so that users can edit the city records.

I've spent a day or two to move all the countries under the right continent and to clean up all the accents and such, now the time of bulk import has arrived.

Today I have created an other interface for TMC. Shuffled with the links as you may have noticed, but I am pleased now with this layout/setup.

I have used themes/garland which gives the option to also change the color-setting of the website. Instead of using the primary navigation (which is not very visible) I have moved the items to the main navigation. User login box is moved to the righthandside and there is one item left which I'd like to realise: put all admin links also to the righthandside so we don't have to search for these links when the site is a bit bigger.

This time to the 'node relativity' module.

The module did not include an option to allow you to list all the parent nodes as a path for pathauto.

In my case, I have a countries, regions and cities table. The format for a city url is:

/geoinfo/countryname/regionname/cityname.html

That really needs walking recursively back up the chain of parent nodes to figure out the url for the city page, based on the title of the parent alone you wouldn't get further than region.

Today I found out about the 'node relativity' module that allows you to link nodes in parent/child/sibling relationships.

Views is fairly easily modified to select on a parent/child relationship and I've used that to get rid of the custom php block that I wrote before to make the display of the images that go with a city.

Now I'm still left with a bunch of ugly links from the node relativity module that I'll have to get rid of.

Images are probably the most frustrating element of working with drupal. Nothing is easy or as you expect it, it's that simple. There are lots of different ways of doing things but none of them are complete enough that you can stay away from custom coding if you want anything beyond the very basics.