Unless I screwed it up, I now have content notification available on angrydonuts. If you have a local account you can just go to My Account, click My Notify Settings and turn it on If you have a drupal.org account, you can login here using your drupal.org account. I don’t think the livejournal module works for 4.7 yet, but I’ll install that at some point when it’s updated.

I’ve already discussed my issues with the current node access, and even presented a possible solution. The nice thing about that solution is that it can work as a contrib module and live in its own little universe; other contrib modules can rely on it, and things can work, and I believe it can work well.

But it doesn’t address another issue, and that issue is fine-tuning access control. There are times when role-based access control just doesn’t work well. When that happens, the only solution ends up being something along the lines of access control lists. The first thing that came to mind when ACLs were mentioned to me was “OH DEAR GOD NO!!!” but as I thought about it, it started to seem to work a little bit better for me.

When I first downloaded and installed Drupal, I did some of the usual things. I installed the blog module and forum module and played around with them. After about 5 minutes of playing I turned off blog.module. Too restrictve. Did its thing its way and that was pretty much it. Didn’t seem like anything I needed, and really, I don’t think it seems like anything anybody needs, except maybe in a couple of particular situations.

When I played with the forum—and later the image—modules, I realized something interesting. This ‘great and powerful tool’ that many people define Drupal with, Taxonomy, was being used not to classify, but contain.

I have a love/hate relationship with Node_Access in Drupal. It’s a very wonderful idea, and I’m glad we have it; it is very important to be able to create restricted content. That’s important in both a community system, where some levels of the community are behind closed doors, and it’s important in a publishing system where not all content is for all eyes, especially prior to publishing.

Unfortunately, the node_access system is very all or nothing. Multiple node access modules can’t work together. A node access module has to control every bit of content or none at all. This is especially inconvenient in systems where it’s only a small piece of the site you want to control access to, or worse—two small, unrelated pieces of the site.

This actually started out as a single idea, then it blossomed into three ideas, and then at the very end of my thinking, it reduced to two ideas. Apparently I’d forgotten why I’d written a certain high profile module, and it took me a good 30 minutes to realize I was approaching it from the slightly wrong angle.

In order to preserve that flawed logic, I will describe my train of thought: One of the things I have long wanted, but have not yet gotten around to doing, is to allow scheduling based upon the Node Queue. One of the original design points, and the reason it’s even called a queue is that it’s supposed to be a bucket that a site maintainer can drop nodes in. They go in on one end, and eventually they go out another end.

I meant to have this one finished something like 2 weeks ago, but it kept getting more complex than I expected. Well, that’s why Views is in development and not a finished product, since it points me at weaknesses in the system that module developers may notice.

In any case the Views Bookmark project exists to illustrate some advanced functionality available to module developers who wish to use Views functionality to enhance their own modules. Also it is a useful module in its own right.

Some time ago, chx posted a method to do a multi-part form. The problem with the method was that it required a lot of interesting tricks that made the actual flow very difficult to understand and was very frustrating to use.

I have a simpler one. Here is a demo.

It makes me very happy that there are people out there who find Views module or Node Queue module and find that it makes their site better/faster/easier (or just makes it work).

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I’d call this Day 4, because to me it is, but DrupalCon was only really 3 days. The day has been quite relaxed; many folks have left, and many of the ones that are around are beyond my ability to find them. I think they’re doing various things at Moosecamp/Northern Voices which is a blogging conference/hacking get together, but I’m not sure what rooms things are going on in. I’ve gotten to see a couple of people here and there, at least, and I’m typing up these blog entries in relative silence sitting next to hunmonk who is very absorbed doing some kind of actual work.

The morning began with a very sudden alarm at 6:30, which was turned off in that very short span of time in which I was awake. Actual wakefulness didn’t occur until almost 9. I rushed through the morning preparation process and made it down to the con before my session was to start. (I didn’t actually oversleep; I had nothing scheduled for the 8:30 slot).

For the ten o’clock session, Adrian, John Van Dyke, JonBob and I had pencilled — or rather sharpied — in an ad hoc Views/CCK session, designed around the idea of getting community ideas to fix a few issues, ensure the direction we’re going is the right one, and to get the community excited about where we’re going.

Day two started bright and early, and included the phenomenon that I once again made it in on time. This time I braved the cold and a very light sprinkle that didn’t qualify as rain and frankly didn’t even qualify as mist — in fact it really only qualified as a mildly chilly wetness — and headed down to the Tim Horton’s that I’d spotted the night before. It was actually a couple of blocks out of my way, on the other side of where the con met up, but it was not particularly far out of my way.

The first session involved poor Walker getting up and talking about the File API. He got up there and gave a great talk on why what we have is only quasi-functional, what some of the problems are and what needs to be done. It was very nicely done, inspirational, and of course received absolutely nothing resembling volunteers to actually help him do it. Walker is basically the File API Guy, even though it’s pretty clear he doesn’t actually want to be. It’s not a thankless task — people will thank him a lot — but I don’t think it’s going to be a particularly rewarding task.

I arrived last night. The trip was remarkably smooth--so smooth, in fact, that I'm not entirely sure that I’m not in an alternate dimension. International travel shouldn’t be that easy. Oh sure, I went to the wrong terminal at SFO, but the right terminal wasn’t even a long walk away, I was so completely early that even if the line through security had been as long as usual that I would’ve had plenty of time. As it was I was at the gate a full hour before boarding started. I wasn’t yet feeling up to doing any reading, so I played solitaire on my Hiptop, joked a bit with my sweetie via IM, and hung out.

Ok, somebody knows I'm gone. I'm in Vancouver, and I've utterly failed to be social. Not really feeling up to dealing with people this evening. I'm not entirely sure I'm really ready for this, but oh well. I'm here, and that's the way it goes.

Contrary to what I've been told, Tim Horton's are not as ubiquitous as Sbux. I've seen a Sbux, and I've not yet seen a Timmy's. Where are I going to get my angry donuts tomorrow? Huh huh? TELL ME.

It's close to midnight, I have failed to be social. I did have a nice red ale at the 'Irish pub' downstairs, which is no more or less Irish than any loud bar with photos of Ireland decorating the walls. But a hot waittress with nice legs and a short skirt and a decent red ale (Wickard's, if I remember right) and some enh food almost made up for the noise level.

Tonight I get on a plane to Vancouver, to head on up to OSCMS summit and DrupalCon. I’m both looking forward to it and anxious over the whole thing.

In general I am not a large crowd person unless I’m relatively familiar with most of the people there. I know a lot of names from the IRC, but online chat and in-person interaction are two very different things with people. Some people make me naturally uncomfortable. Not through any fault of their own, but due to my own issues with personal space and my ability to communicate vocally.

Well, once I get to know a few people I expect the anxiety will pass. I’ll be back on Friday evening. I expect to have access while there, so nobody’ll know I’ve been gone, and I’ll try to post here and there about how things go.

One thing about my dreams is that occasionally I end up in a dream where I don't receive the expected response to stimulus. Often this manifests in the 'going to the bathroom' dream, where I have to pee, and I do so, but it just doesn't ever stop. This is easily explained as me feeling the real body's need to pee, and interpreting it in the dream. The dream-self pees, but the real body doesn't; thus, infinite peeing.

Last night, however, I dreamt about donuts. I didn't get the real response to eating donuts -- a nice sensation of no longer being hungry -- so at the end of the dream I went back to the counter and bought about $25 worth of donuts because I thought I might still be hungry later.

I got an PHP opcache installed which should, I hope, speed up the performance of the site. I have seen an improvement, but I want to spend some quality time with xdebug when I have some free time and see if there are other obvious trouble spots.

Let me know of any interesting observations about performance! This site doesn’t really do a whole lot, so it’s not going to hit some of the more interesting bottlenecks.

It’s clear from Dries’ blog entry that the future of Drupal is going to lean more and more towards enhancing the User Experience. Drupal excels in functionality, but it is often lacking in terms of being able to actually accomplish the minutiae of setting up a site.

A quick look at all of the stuff I’ve contributed to Drupal since I started will suggest that I also consider the user experience very important. I am big on configurability; very little of what I’ve written has actually added new functionality. The bulk of it has simply made it easier to configure things to be the way you want. Dashboards simply make columnation easier. Views make collections easier. Nodequeue makes a specific type of categorization easier. The very fact that node queue exists and that people choose it is an indication that taxonomy, while very powerful, is lacking somewhat in User Experience.

All that aside, that isn’t what I’m here to talk about.