Gee, what happened to 2009? I have been so busy with other things, this website has definitely been lacking some attention. Heck, its still running on Drupal 5! Now that Drupal 7 is in alpha release, I guess I better start work on upgrading this baby to D6 (or maybe I'll just wait until 7 gets released - procrastination 101).

Here's a couple of cool modules/themes that I have discovered in the last little while, and that I now use on most sites I build:

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OK, that's it. I've had enough of those damn comment spammers. Its not bots anymore, unless they've figured out a way to beat the random word Captcha, which is highly unlikely. So, most likely, its some #^@%$#^ getting paid to do this. The only way to stop these morons, is to not allow ANY URLS in a comment. So don't even try posting a link, as it will immediately get marked as spam. Sorry to everyone else, but I'm just tired of these people. Until someone invents a way for me to push a button and blow them all to hell and gone, this is the way it has to be.

/rant

On a client's site, the Post Preview option is turned on to reduce the amount of bad posts. However, as an admin, this is a real pain - I hate having to Preview first and then Submit. So I did some digging and found out a couple of other people are also interested in a solution. A chap by the name of Markus Petrux has even released a small module (for 4.7) that allows certain roles to bypass the forced preview. You can select which roles in the Access Control page. His module can be found here.

I am writing this as a warning to everyone who owns a domain and doesn't want to get ripped off.

There is a company called The Domain Registry of Canada (DROC) that does something called "domain slamming". What they do is send domain owners a letter saying that their is going to expire soon and to avoid losing it they should renew it immediately. If you do, you actually transfer your domain to them, and end up paying 5 times more for your domain. They charge $40 per year for a .com, but you can easily find it for around $8 elsewhere.

If you're one of those SEO obsessed people and if you're also a Drupal user, then you'll probably know about the Meta Tags module (also called Nodewords). You might even know about the Page Title module too. And, just maybe, you've also tried to find a way to change the <title> text, not only on nodes (which Page Title does just fine), but also on taxonomy/term pages (which neither module does at all).

In keeping with the theme of the previous post, here is another fantastic tip for pulling out more levels of your primary links menu.

By default, Drupal gives you primary and secondary links. These can come from the same menu tree; primary links will be the first level, and secondary links will be the second level. But what happens when you want the third level? Drupal does not give you this variable by default.

There are quite a few posts about setting the active trail properly with primary & secondary links. In Drupal 5.x, its actually handled pretty well if you use the following code to print your primary & secondary links in page.tpl.php

Seeing as I have a lot of work these days, and clients are always asking me to tweak stuff, I thought it might be a good idea to have some sort of version control on the stylesheets, template files & modules, that I work on. That way, if something I do breaks something else, I'll be able to rollback more easily to a previous working version.

So I set about trying to figure out how to do this on a Windows XP machine using CVSNT and WinCVS. Information is pretty sparse on the ground, especially for CVSNT v2.5.03 - most info is for older versions.

I finally scraped together some time and updated my website to Drupal 5.3. I still had some flexinode content on the site that I have now switched over to CCK nodes. I also changed the Portfolio system so that each project is now a CCK node - I used image module for this before.

I am still planning on updating the theme, so this back-end update was the first step in that process.

Now I am able to use the latest and greatest version of CAPTCHA to block those freaking spammers. Try get through this, you little buggers!

NOTE: This tutorial is for Drupal 5 only. For Drupal 6, take a look at the Content Profile module.