aylard.ca

Lately I've been doing a lot of work with Drupal 6.x 's date and calendar modules.  During this time I have struggled with quite a few issues related to the stability of the date module code.

Problem #1:  A problem was discovered with the date repeat function.  Testing showed that the "Until Date" would increment by one day each time the node was edited.  This issues was solved by using the dev release of the date module.

Problem #2:  When using the Feeds module to import an iCal feed from Google, date repeats were causing the code to enter a closed loop, resulting in a max execution time exceeded error.  A patch found in the Drupal issues log was installed in the date repeat function which solved the error.

Problem #3:  All day events imported using the Feeds module are showing with a start time of 20:00 on the day before the item was originally schedules.  This appears to be a quirk in the way that Drupal date handles an all day event.  There doesn't seem to be a valid fix to this issue yet.   More work will be required to find a temporary solution to the issue,   A temporary patch has been applied to correct the issue until an approved solution is released.

I began the testing of the iCal feeds from the Drupal Calendars on my test site.  Each of the three calendars on the site will have iCal feeds configured.  Some clients have asked for the ability to be able to see all their calendars in one place.  The clients use both Yahoo and Google for their personal calendars.  The Google calendar is currently configured to include calendar events for the next 3 years starting at the current date.  So what was the results of the testing?    

I had an opportunity to learn the "ins and outs" of the Ubercart module for Drupal.  Ubercart provides an eCommerece platform that can be customized and integrated with a Drupal based website.  The functionality requirements were: sell clothing, sell events, manage event registration, security, payment and reporting.

Change is always tough, but sometimes the gain made by the change far surpasses the pain .  This may be one of those times.  Since this blog was meant to be a learning opportunity as well as a means to inflict my views and musings on anyone that cares to listen.  The first change will be a  to the format.  The blog content will be devided into a teaser and body.

In order to improve the usability of the blog, it is time to make some changes. 

I noticed a very significant colour shift in a few of my photos after I uploaded photos to my drupal photo gallery.   Since I have upgraded many of the image related modules over the last few months and also switched to Adobe Lightroom 3, it wasn't initially apparent what was causing the colour shift.

The process of developing a custom theme for the aylard.ca website is well underway.  A decision was made to start with a blank slate and build the theme manually. A custom Zen sub- theme was developed for acbsbw.com.  Based on the experience working with the zen theme, I didn't see a substantial benefit for using the Zen theme.

While working on the forum on acbsbw.com, I found that Internet Explorer was not applying my main css style sheet.
Some pages would display properly and some would not.
I tracked the problem down to a limitation in IE.  It seems that IE will only load a maximum of 30 style sheets and will just ignore the rest.  My style sheet was the 31st.

The creation of the email based news letter for the Bluewater Chapter of the Antique and Classic Boat Society is almost complete.  This turned into a terrific learning opportunity.

Although the task sounds easy, it is far from a "walk in the park".  The lack of support for HTML and CSS in todays email packages creates numerous problems in formatting an attractive and stable newsletter.  The worst offenders in HTML and CSS support is  Microsoft.  Outlook 2007 uses the authoring tools from Microsoft Word which is not standards compliant.  Support for newsletter layout using <div> tags is not possible.  The use of <table> tag seems to be the preferred method for creating layout.

But first let's set the scene for this project.  The website is based on the current versions of Drupal 6.x, CCK, Views, Simplenews, Insert, Filefield, Imagefield, Imagecache and MIME all custom themed with Zen.

The need to backup and restore Drupal websites was my focus over the past couple of days.
A proper site backup must target the MySQL database, the /sites/default directory and the /sites/all/themes directory.