May Drupal Hack Night #1
Time/Location
Tuesday, May 12 2009, 6:30 - 9:30pm
Coalmarch Productions, LLC
125 Edinburgh South Drive Suite 200
Cary, NC, 27511
Schedule
6:30 - 7:00pm - Mingle Time
7:00 - 7:15pm - Come up with a list of problems that need attention and who can solve them
7:15 - 9:30pm - Hack away!
Agenda
We had a really successful Hack Night last week, and we can't wait to host more! Coalmarch will be hosting 2 Drupal Hack Nights in May, so think up some great projects and problems for us to help you with!
Unlike our usual monthly meetings we will not have a presenter on this night. The Hack Night is geared towards folks who are currently using Drupal and are looking from some advice, help with a specific issue or to collaborate with others on a project.
To get the most out of this meeting, come prepared with a specific goal, question or project in mind (or just come with your knowledge and desire to help others!).
What are some questions or projects you plan to bring to the Hack Night? Discuss below!
Concurrent Hack Night Locations
If you have interest in attending Hack Night but Cary is not a convenient location for you, tell us in a reply to this thread! We have the option of holding 2 or more concurrent Hack Nights in different cities (perhaps in Durham or Chapel Hill) for small groups (6 - 10 people), but we want to see if there would be enough interest to support a Hack Night at another location. Also, if you have a venue to suggest or offer, please let us know!
Hooray for hack night
Looking forward to the hack night tonight. My plan is to get a Facebook application up and running using the Drupal for Facebook module: http://drupal.org/project/fb
If that fails, I might try out Panels 3 and making a nice custom frontpage. What are other people going to work on?
Damage Control
I'm still trying to fix some basic problems on our FrankenDrupal site, and trying to absorb enough PHP to figure out how the whole thing has been duct-taped together. The current puzzler is how to make certain navigational links to membership & donation links secure, or failing that, how to get rid of them without deleting the actual pages or messing up the way the forms are handled. I can make links in the body of the page secure now, but not the nav links; at least, I haven't figured out a way to do it without making ALL links on the site https. (I tried using the securepages module but it didn't work because of the hacked core.) So unless I come up with a solution in the next couple hours, that's what I'm planning to work on.
-Nik
Link permissions
I don't know about switching from http to https and back but as for making some nav links show for specific users.. I have done that.
I was making a member section and came up with this solution.
To start with, Drupal 6 doesn't have a View Pages permission section. All the others like edit and delete but not view. So you can't use permission to prevent guest from seeing some pages. The other week, I surprised a vet drupal person with that little tidbit.
So, I installed two modules
Content Access -- http://drupal.org/project/content_access
ACL -- http://drupal.org/project/acl
Content Access allows me to specify view permissions by role on each page. I can say view this page only if you are authenticated, for example. If you are a guest, then you won't see that this page even exist. One of the results is that If that page is used as a navigation link, the guest doesn't see it.
Because if Content Access, I created two menu items called Members Only. One for Guest and one for Authenticated users. Each only sees the one they are supposed to see. The guest one ask them to login to see the content in that section. The Authenticated one contains the first page of that section. As Admin, I see both.
ACL is not required and does nothing on its own. It adds a section to your permissions for each page. You can, for example, give user rsmith, for example, edit permission on the content of that node and only that node. That way, if Roger Smith suggest a story, you can create the node and give him the ability to put content on it himself without giving him site wide permissions or creating a new role.
If you are at the hack night tonight, I can show you this on my test site. Me, I am struggling with making it live. Themes are not displaying if I change anything on my "live" site and I haven't figured out why.
.htaccess
The securepages module appears to just be an interface that lets you set up redirect rules, which you can do directly in a variety of other ways.
Our SSL path rules happen at the F5 load balancer because that's where the SSL cert lives, but you could do it via php and I'm pretty sure the .htaccess way of doing it is fairly easy.
Ken Winters
www.coalmarch.com
Won't make it tonight
Alas, I was really looking forward to tonight but am fried after a long day and don't feel like I can make the haul into Cary. Am very interested in having one of these in Durham; wish I had a venue I could offer but I think my home office would be a bit cramped for more than two people. :-)