The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 5,300 times in 2010. That’s about 13 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 6 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 9 posts.

The busiest day of the year was March 23rd with 44 views. The most popular post that day was Drupal wysiwyg image upload.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were drupal.org, blooniverse.com, drupalearth.com, drupal.ru, and flashenabledblog.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for mootools vs jquery, drupal mootools, drupal wysiwyg image upload, drupal menu trails, and mootools drupal.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Drupal wysiwyg image upload March 2010
2 comments

Drupal Active trail for menu March 2010
4 comments

Drupal: Mootools vs. JQuery March 2010
3 comments

Drupal date datetime datestamp March 2010
1 comment

URLRequest in AS3 August 2009

For easy node creation and editing I’m nowadays using the CKEditor Module, which is really beautiful and gives the client a familiar interface if they’ve ever used text editors. The one problem is that it does not, from start, support image upload.

One solution to this is buying the commercial product CKFinder and use it in combination. This is most likely a great solution, this far though I’ve settled for a ‘hack’ that lets you combine the CKEditor with the IMCE module for uploads, which also works great and is free to use. The details on installing it can be found here and to get the IMCE integration to look as good as possible (also since IMCE by default looks like shit), take a look at this.

Update January 9 2011:

My currently preferred solution to wysiwyg image upload is to use CCK imagefields to upload the files, then the module insert to insert them into the node body. Once inserted you can open them up with the CKEditor image option to set various properties. The main reason for using this approach is that it stores the image data with the node, which makes it much easier to migrate all images with the nodes in the future. Also, this approach is easy to combine with imagecache and lightbox2 to create dynamic image popups and displays.

If it’s not a specific wish from the customer to be able to add images in the body though, I prefer having a view handle the images separately from the whole body text, to make it harder for the end user to screw up the layout.

Oh, and also; if you don’t know the differences and don’t care to find out – go with Datetime as a standard.

So, from my experience and from what I’ve seen in forums on drupal.org it seems most people battling with site development in Drupal sooner or later ends up at a point where you wish the menu system was more easily customizable.

For example; say I want all my news posts to highlight the News tab in the primary menu without being actual child nodes in the menu hierarchy. The solutions I’ve seen (and used) to do this includes just using CSS (Zen theme adds node type to body classes) and modules (Menu trails), all of which seems like rather unstable workarounds around the real problem. Add to the problem that you might want to classify certain nodes in the hierarchy the same way, and that you might want to do something cool with both the menu li and a element (as in having two pictures for buttons of varying sizes) and I’ve found myself creating more and more workarounds that really aren’t nice.

Therefore I decided to dig into it a bit to find a general solution for my problems, which I’ve now done. This solution is a customization of the theme_links() function, and therefore will not work with menu blocks which uses theme_menu_links() instead for some reason, which works differently as the link variable there is just a string so you can’t easily access the href attribute or so (and getting into string reading in php would just seem like another workaround).

It works by checking the current URL comparing it to the link targets in the menu and if they match sets an active trail to the li element. For example; I organize all my news posts on my site with Pathauto module to get following pattern; mysite.com/news/news-title. In my primary links menu I have a tab News which points to mysite.com/news. So if you surf to a news article (news/news-title) the code will check if any links on the site is equal to eighter ‘news’ or ‘news-title’ and if so highlight that menu item.

The fact that ‘news-title’ also is used for matching might not be your desired behavior, you might want to replace the in_array() comparison to a comparison of just the first part of the navigation structure, i.e. semantic_path[0]. Anyways, here’s the solution (I recommend copying the text to a text editor to get it more readable) to my active trails headaches:

function THEMENAME_links($links, $attributes = array('class' => 'links')) {
global $language;
$output = '';

if (count($links) > 0) {
$output = '
';

$num_links = count($links);
$i = 1;

foreach ($links as $key => $link) {
$class = $key;

// Add first, last and active classes to the list of links to help out themers.
if ($i == 1) {
$class .= ' first';
}
if ($i == $num_links) {
$class .= ' last';
}
if (isset($link['href']) && ($link['href'] == $_GET['q'] || ($link['href'] == '' && drupal_is_front_page()))
&& (empty($link['language']) || $link['language']->language == $language->language)) {
$class .= ' active';
}

/**
* Perrong code.
* Checks if the current URL contains the link target at some level, if so sets active trail to
* li element.
*/
$semantic_path = explode("/", $_REQUEST['q']);
if (in_array(drupal_get_path_alias($link['href']), $semantic_path)){
$class .= ' active-trail';
}// End added code

$output .= '
$class)).'>';

if (isset($link['href'])) {
// Pass in $link as $options, they share the same keys.
$output .= l($link['title'], $link['href'], $link);
}
else if (!empty($link['title'])) {
// Some links are actually not links, but we wrap these in for adding title and class attributes
if (empty($link['html'])) {
$link['title'] = check_plain($link['title']);
}
$span_attributes = '';
if (isset($link['attributes'])) {
$span_attributes = drupal_attributes($link['attributes']);
}
$output .= ''. $link['title'] .'';
}

$i++;
$output .= "

\n";
}

$output .= '

';
}

return $output;
}

Update:

This post seems to reach quite many people, so obviously the active trail problem is live and well in the community. I’d love to hear of your solutions to this problem too.

Update January 9 2011:

As I’ve written below in a reply to a comment, I nowadays thinks solution is obsolete, I now use Context with patch 835090-4-context_reaction_menu_trail.patch applied to set menu trails for certain contexts (like nodetypes for instance).

From some searching I’ve found that you can use JQuery function noConflict() and customizing all .js files that uses JQuery to get them to behave well together. This though creates some problems with updating modules or core since you’ve hacked them. Therefore I consider it an Ad Hoc solution that should be avoided whenever possible.

That leaves me with the task of rewriting all the Mootools code that the designer has gathered over the years in JQuery,  which isn’t perhaps the most fun solution but a more solid one and also forces me to really understand the code I’m putting into the website.

Is this the best solution, or are there advantages in using Mootools on your Drupal site that I’ve missed? Feel free to enlighten me!

Update:

From the comment below I’ve realized that it’s now also possible to wrap Mootools code so that it doesn’t break your JQuery code, which makes it easy to add some Mootools code to the site. The drawback is the performance penalties from using two libraries, but for small websites it’s a great working solution.

Update 2:

Adding Mootools code still breaks certain modules (like Panels, IMCE file upload and so on) so there really is too much trouble to be worth the effort trying to implement it.

That said, the Date-View combination gives a lot of cool opportunities and will probably in time become much less frustrating. Hopefully I will get savy enough to help contribute as well in time, but for now I’ll stick to doing hacks that solves my specific problems but not the general ones.

At first I thought that this would be as simple as usual implementing a view by just calling it with:
<?php print views_embed_view("name-of-view", "default", argument); ?>

This resulted in an error message though stating that:

“Javascript is required to view this map”

Not very helpful, since Javascript is up and running. The problem is that some module specific .js files need to be imported, not that Javascript isn’t running. In the head of your .tpl file you need to add some scripts. What worked for me was as follows:

<script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&amp;v=2.115&amp;key=[Your API key here directly followed by]&amp;hl=en" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="[change following src:s to your path to the gmap module]/gmap/js/gmap.js?Q"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/dp/sites/all/modules/gmap/js/marker.js?Q"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/dp/sites/all/modules/gmap/js/gmap_marker.js?Q"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/dp/sites/all/modules/gmap/js/poly.js?Q"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/dp/sites/default/files/js/gmap_markers.js?Q"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/dp/sites/all/modules/gmap/js/icon.js?Q"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/dp/sites/all/modules/gmap/js/markerloader_static.js?Q"></script>

This could probably be put in a template.php function instead and added to the $scripts variable, but since I’m currently exploring the possibilities of combining Gmap Views with Taxonomy and Date/Calendar and not working on slim code I’ll leave it at that for now.

If these scripts shouldn’t work out’ve the box for you, open up a page-view of your Gmap and look in the source code there for what scripts are added and copy everything Gmap related to your .tpl file.

…whereas the preferred output would be;

After scouting the net for some time I found a reply on Stack Overflow from this user who had run into the same problem. The problem lies in the Devel submodule Theme Developer. For users not logged into your site the list will output correctly but to display the list correctly to authenticated users you will have to inactivate the Theme Developer module.

For example, I’ve been spending some time today working out how to easiest serialize (if that was supported in AS3) arrays to send them to a php file to submit them to the database. For serializing I ended up using a basic for-loop and ‘.’ as divider, but you could also download the package provided by http://www.sephiroth.it for easy standard serialization (php style).

More frustrating was finding out the right way to send the data.
The AS2 way that is easily available online is to use the LoadVars object, something along the line of:

sender = new LoadVars();
sender.answers = serializedAn;
sender.timestamps = serializedTi;
sender.send("/URL/file.php", "_self", "POST");

The AS3 way that took me some time to find and get up working is:

var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest ("./URL/file.php");
request.method = URLRequestMethod.POST;
var variables:URLVariables = new URLVariables();
variables.answers = serializedAn;
variables.timestamps = serializedTi;
request.data = variables;
navigateToURL(request, '_self');

Now it works like a beauty.