CivicActions

Drupal 6 Themes by Ric Shreeves on Packt Publishing is a great resource for newbie Drupal themers. Themers who are not from a programming background will find it especially useful since it starts with the basics and builds up to more complex yet powerful techniques such as hook_form_alter().

For most common requirements -- especially multi-lingual sites -- the Location package is not a good solution for locative data in Drupal 6. The Location package does not handle i18n well and has l10n problems without simple or general solutions with translation sets. The recommendation for most cases where locative data is stored in Drupal 6, is to and migrate the data to taxonomy vocabularies and CCK fields. Both of these options have general solutions for most common i18n issues which make it more flexible for a variety of possible i18n requirements.

Perhaps I am too critical or my expectations are too high. In any case I was disappointed with Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6. It may be somewhat useful for Drupal beginners seeking an introduction, general guidance or even basic help, but it lacks the detail and usefulness beginners are likely to need to get tasks done early on. I would expect most Drupal beginners to require more complete and comprehensive resources than what this book provides.

The book appears to have been written under the assumption that it will be read from front to back. But the reality is, at least from my experience, that most technical books are used in a fairly random order for reference when help on a specific problem or topic is sought. The sentences are often long, winding and more detailed or complex than necessary. This makes it difficult to scan for keywords, search for context or comprehend in a hurry. Many details encourage bad practices or are misleading. Most of these issues are minor, however the frequency of them is concerning. Shorthand PHP tags and bad code style occur in a number of places <? print $something; ?>.

UPDATE: Buddhika Amila Sampath created the Light Fantastic theme, not Joshua Brauer. Joshua is the maintainer.

I recently searched on Themebot for a great contributed Drupal flexible-width theme for DrupalSouth.net.nz and found Light Fantastic. Joshua Brauer maintains the awesome Light Fantastic theme, which was created by Buddhika Amila Sampath as part of the Google Summer of Code 2007.

Screenshot of Light Fantastic on the DrupalSouth website:

See a larger image.

To rebuild the menu in Drupal 6 you have to go to admin/build/modules.

In drupal 5 the menu is cached in the cache_menu table, so it is easy to invoke a menu-rebuild by emptying the table with a simple mysql command like TRUNCATE cache_menu;. (I have a handy script that empties all tables starting with cache_).

I just got this email from Mozilla about the soon release of Firefox 3 release candidate, asking addon developers to get their extensions updated and released for FF3 RCs. If you have an extension released on addons.mozilla.org you would have received this email too. I have two variations of FF2's default Mac theme that enable favicons in the bookmarks toolbar: Mac Favicon and Mac Favicon XL.