• DSL Book WIP
  Martin Fowler’s working on a book about Domain Specific Languages, and sharing some insights into the process as he goes
  (tags: book dsl martinfowler writing)
• howshouldivote.com.au
  Helping Australians analyse their candidates
  (tags: australia edemocracy participationtools)
• No Limits With RETS (Yahoo! Developer Network blog)
  An XML standard for distributing real estate data. I’ve worked enough with such systems to know it’s much needed, but can’t imaging I’ll be using it in the near future as I don’t work with them any more.
  (tags: mls realestate rets xml)
• A List Apart: Articles: How to Size Text in CSS
  A good overview of the state of play for text sizing and managing line height across the current crop of common browsers
  (tags: fontsizing typography webdesign)

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One of the many tricky decisions to be made when building content management tools is how to allow users to control the basic formatting of their input without breaking your carefully crafted layouts or injecting nasty hacks into your pages. One approach has long been to provide your own markup language. Instead of allowing users to write HTML, let them use bbcode, or markdown, or textile, which have more controlled vocabularies and rules that mean it’s much less likely that problems will occur.

Textile in particular has a nice simple syntax and is increasingly popular thanks to its adoption in products like those of 37signals. In Ruby, there’s the RedCloth library which makes it fast and easy to convert textile to HTML. The one problem is if you already have a body of user generated HTML in your legacy system that needs converting. That’s the situation I found myself in this week and I quickly needed a tool to translate the content so that I could get on with the more interesting parts of the system.

Searching for options, the ClothRed library which offers some translation, but it doesn’t handle important elements like links. I considered patching it to handle the elements I need, but in the end I decided to take a different approach and used the SGML parsing library found here to port a python html2textile parser.

Porting code from python to ruby is a pretty straightforward process as the language’s are so similar on a number of levels, but there were several issues to work through, particularly relating to scoping, and quite a few methods to change to make them feel a little more ruby-ish. I’ve not converted all of the entity handling as I didn’t really need it, but there might be a bit of work to do in making sure character set issues are properly taken care of.

The end result is a piece of code that’s now served its purpose and that I’m unlikely to need again for quite a while. It’s not something that I’m particularly proud of, it could almost certainly be implemented more neatly, but I thought I’d throw it out there in case it could be useful to someone else. Should you be inspired to take it and twist it and turn it into a well-heeled, more robust and properly distributable solution, feel free, but please let me know so that at the very least I can update this entry.

Grab the code here or view it here.

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A couple of months ago I found myself needing to generate a “tag cloud” in drupal. The contents of the cloud would be all the children categories of a container and as is the norm with tag clouds it needed to display those children at varying sizes based on how popular they are. I looked around at the existing options but none fitted my requirements in how they integrated with the category module, or producing semantically helpful html.

So I rolled my own. It’s a quick module that just provides a few simple utilities. The cloud is initially generated as an unordered list, with the number of nodes matching each tag included in brackets, eg:

<ul>
  <li><a href="/node/1" rel="tag">tag one (5 entries)</a></li>
  <li><a href="/node/3" rel="tag">tag three (8 entries)</a></li>
  <li><a href="/node/2" rel="tag">tag two (2 entries)</a></li>
  <li><a href="/node/6" rel="tag">tag six (4 entries)</a></li>
</ul>

There’s then a jquery function, called on document load, that works through the list, hides the content in the brackets, and changes the size of the text based on the tag’s popularity.

You can include it in a page by calling:

< ?php tagcloud_include($container_id); ?>

within your theme. I’ve tested the module against drupal 4.7 but it should work fine in 5.x (and I guess 6.x).

I don’t have time or the inclination to do much more work with this module, or to provide support for it, but it seemed worth throwing out there in case anyone else wants to build on it. If you’d like to adopt it, let me know and we can collaborate.

If you’re interested, you can get the tarball here.

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• PHPMock: Independent Mock Object/Stub Framework - Maugrim The Reaper’s Blog
  Looks like there’s work on a mocking library for PHP that’s independent of the testing libraries. That’s a much needed development.
  (tags: bdd mocks php tdd unittesting)
• PHPSpec Reporting Gets A Needed Boost - Maugrim The Reaper’s Blog
  PHPSpec is a behaviour-driven development library for PHP code.
  (tags: bdd php)
• Google LatLong: Think globally, mark locally
  Has google maps got the wrong spot for your house? Now you can correct it. Nice idea.
  (tags: googlemaps neogeography usergeneratedcorrections)
• Last.fm – the Blog · Lucky Soul for Christmas No. 1
  last.fm are trying to compete with XFactor et. al. and push this single to Christmas Number 1 (a big deal in the UK, for those not familiar with it). I’ve not heard it yet, but it’s a good publicity stunt regardless.
  (tags: charts christmasnumberone lastfm)

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It’s surprising given drupal’s popularity that there aren’t more books covering it in detail. Site launches and contributions by the likes of lullabot and bryght have pushed the CMS’ profile and recent releases have emphasised the Web 2.0 potential, but a quick look at amazon reveals only four related titles. Of the four, Pro Drupal Development is definitely the most developer focussed.

This isn’t a book for a drupal newbie. Going in you’ll want to have spent at least a little time setting up a drupal site or two, and while there’s no need to be a PHP guru the authors do presume you’re not going to need help understanding their code samples. They focus on drupal’s internals, with a lot of time spent writing modules, understanding the user, node, menu, theme and related systems, and a little attention for performance optimisation.

There’s a lot of ground to cover and most chapters are short, giving just the essentials on each area. You’ll probably want to pause from time to time to try out the code samples unless you’re already experienced at writing drupal modules. Having written a number of modules and run into various problems I found I was able to focus on the new information and how it would have affected my approach, but if this is new ground the structure of the book may make it rather overwhelming.

The writers are keen to encourage their readers to read the book in order, and some chapters certainly do build on their predecessors, but the real strength of this is likely to be as a reference guide. A quick once-through will help newcomers to module development get a sense of how everything fits together, but chances are you’ll then want to refer back when you actually encounter problems that a given chapter can help with.

I was disappointed not to see more coverage of testing drupal code. As I mentioned yesterday, the lack of attention paid to automated testing in the drupal community frustrates me and it seems that for a book like this to not to provide some coverage of sensible testing regimens is a missed opportunity. Similarly, it would be really good to have some coverage of deployment tips, particularly relating to upgrading active sites. Both of those seem to me like core topics for any book purporting to provide a guide for professionals, but the priorities of the book mirror those of the drupal community where neither topic appears to be a significant concern.

For any experienced developer who needs to get to grips with the insides of drupal and/or write custom extensions, this book will be invaluable. The style won’t suit those looking for a broader scope or lengthier tutorials, but it will help you get to grips with each of the major components quickly and provide enough information to set you on your way. Hopefully it will also trigger further writing about drupal, which may cover more ground and help developers bring some other vital practices to their drupal work.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher. You can find it at apress, amazon US, amazon UK and all sorts of other places.

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