A comment to a recent blog post revealed one of our hidden plans:

"Drupal Groups" in an anagram of "Popular Drugs."

. While we are talking of anagrams, did you ever believe that story of mixing up various Dutch and English words? Meh. In reality, "Drupal core" is an anagram of "Procedural"...

Drupal now has its own testing framework. Using the simpletest framework enabled us to write tests without trying to envision and build our own framework. However, once a number of tests had been created, it seemed better to gradually replace the SimpleTest framework because it's so very un-Drupalish. First I have rewritten its browser and now we (mostly cwgordon7, dmitrig01 and me) have totally removed it. The new framework came about because we wanted to use batch API and the best place for collecting the messages was a database table.

I am not a historian to be concerned by the past. All I have asked that these two teams of developers come out of their respective corners, come together and work on common APIs. I have been bombared by both teams pointing to each other. Do you know who behaves like that? Kids in kindergarten stating that the fight started with Tommy hitting back!

Duplication is not bad, persay, but there are a great many areas where Ubercart and E-Commerce overlap, interfacing with the exact same external systems, which require the exact same API calls, and there's no reason not to combine efforts to make those APIs/services more usable for both EC, ubercart, and other community members who just want to leverage the API's but have no need for either EC or ubercart. (Quote from beeradb, published with permission)

There is a heated debate on PHP internals list -- this in itself is not news, the list should be called "php heated debate list" btw. -- about short array syntax. What I will write here is probably know to the Drupal readers -- less known to the PHP internals list, I guess. So, I am the form API maintainer of Drupal, which probably is the most complex array based API in existence. I support the $b = ['foo' => 'orange', 'bar' => 'apple', 'baz' => 'lemon']; wholeheartedly.

I longed for this for so many year but somehow never took the effort to research it. Turns out that bash autocompletion can be be made into something sane by adding the following to profile/bashrc:

I have joined drupal.org 2004 May 29. That makes today my fourth birthday. There are 303930 users now, when I joined there were 9445. Despite such a huge, rapidly expanding community, despite having the occassional debate, the occassional disagreement, despite we don't know what we are doing and sometimes the band produces strange music, in it's entirety the Drupal community community rocks. I am happy to be here and hope I can be party to this all for many years to come.

Recently elvis published a challenge to help in the forums. Let me reiterate my commitment to this: I am willing to help in the forums but I am not willing to sift through the drek ( I left the forums because of "high friction" threads ). So, if you find a thread which asks for menu (esp menu v6) or fapi help, just let me know, I can always be found on #drupal.

If your client can't live without WYSIWYG then check out htmlbox. Originally by Remiya Solutions, this editor sucks less.

The other day we had a discussion on #drupal about the speed of various foreach constructs and webchick said I should blog this. First of all, let me give you a crash course on PHP references. Imagine variables values as drawers and names as labels on the drawers. One drawer can have more than one label and that's what we call a reference. So when you write $a = &$b then PHP slaps a label on the drawer that holds the value of $a. Now, if you unset($a) then PHP removes the "a" label from the drawer, however the "b" label is still on it.