Drupal

I just released a new version of User Points which interfaces with Drupal's Ecommerce module.It allows many forms of interaction between those two modules, including:

• Users can purchase points for real money. If the site admin sets up a non-shippable product, users can add it to their cart and pay for it as they do for a real item. A configurable multiplier factor allows one unit of currency to give the user more than one user point. This can be useful when used with certain other modules, for example my job search module, where employers pay to post jobs on a per node basis, or job seekers pay for posting resumes on a per resume basis.
• Users can use their points as a method for purchasing. They accumulate points by posting to the site, moderating, commenting, ...etc. and they they can use their hard earned points for other things. For example, they can redeem their points for additional roles on the site where they can access more content, or they can use it to pay for recurring subscriptions.
• Users who purchase merchandise or services from the site, can gain "reward points" for their purchase, and they can use that for future purchases. This is in addition to the psychological factor that we all fall for that we got something extra when we bought  the main thing.

Of course, users cannot use points to purchase points.

Someone compiled a list of all the available Drupal themes, compared the features of each, and tested them for issues.This is definitely worth reading if you want to select a theme.

Another small module that allows the creation of a service product with variable pricing. Useful for people who engage with clients on projects where the cost varies from one engagement to the other. They can get customers to pay them using credit card or Paypal on the web site.It is based on the donation, another contributed module in the larger Ecommerce family of modules. Here is the CVS view for the service module. 

I released another new module today. This is a somewhat custom module for a certain web site, but it may be of use to others. It allows users with  the right  permission to post "topics" and gather answers from registered users by email. It can be modified to be all web resident if needed, e.g. ranking of answers, making them viewable on the web site, ...etc. More information on the topic module, along with a download link, can be found on the topic project page.

The Stock API module  has been released to the public. This module was developed by Matt Westgate for the wonderful BuyBlue web site.The idea is that this module will fetch the stock data over the internet only when needed, and caches the info in a database table, hence network lag does not slow down the user response, and the system does not get bogged down if too many page views with stock data in them. Since Matt is busy with  E-Commerce, and other stuff, he asked that I take over this module. Of course, this is a good idea, since I do not want code duplication with my original stock module.

PHPonTrax is another Model-View-Controller architecture using PHP.  It used to be called PHP on Rails,  attempting to be the Ruby On  Rails version for PHP.It uses Active Record for Object/Relational Mapping (ORM), much like Hibernate for Java.  

One technology that has been getting good reviews and lots of attention laterly is Ruby On  Rails (RoR). It is a Rapid Internet Application Development framework that is  easy to use and really fast to write applications in.

One of the drawbacks is that it requires the Ruby programmng language, which although powerful, is less widespread than other languages, and hence not available at most web hosts. 

Now there is CakePHP, which is supposed to be Ruby On Rails but for PHP, the most widely deployed web development language. CakePHP follows the Model-View-Controller architecture, and  provides basic  CRUD (Create, Read,  Update, Delete) operations. Of course, it is fully object oriented, just like RoR is.

In a previous article, I described how one would use flexinode to display ads anywhere on the page, and not just blocks. This can be used to achieve things like restricting ads from showing on certain pages.

This can be achieved using Drupal 4.7 regions feature, which, like flexinode, allows multiple regions for blocks to be placed in. The default regions are left sidebar, right sidebar, header, footer and content.

However, blocks are always displayed with their title, which is ugly anywhere apart from the sidebars. Although CSS can be used to hide the header, this is more of a hack than the proper way of doing things.

I have written elsewhere on how and why I convered to Drupal. I still can't remember exactly how I stumbled on it though.A few days back, I noticed that Drupal user page says that I have been a member for two years already ...

As the author of the Drupal adsense module, I often get queries on how to display ads in unusual ways.

Normally ads can be done using one of two ways:

Block Ads

if the ads are in blocks, then you just add  PHP blocks with the call to the adsense_display() function call. Ads in blocks can be restricted to certain pages, for example, you do not want them to display in node/*/edit and node/add/* pages because the Javascript based WYSIWYG editor you use is messed up by Google's Adsense code.