General Drupal

Over the past couple of weeks I've spent quite a lot of time working on getting my Drupal module, Custom Submit Messages ready for a 1.0 Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 release, and helping fix a few other issues that were floating about the Drupal.org issue queues.

I've finally got around to pushing my module, Custom Submit Messages, to its fifth alpha, and the end certainly seems to be in sight with regards to getting the module an official 1.0 release.

This release is a complete re-write that strips out the code that was used to actually change the messages, and replaces it with the methods provided by Michael Barton's excellent Status Messages Alter module.

One of the most frustrating things that can happen when you're building a Drupal site is for the site to go blank - entirely blank, so whenever you load the site you're presented with the infamous White Screen of Death.

There are loads of tips on that page that will help you recover from a WSOD, but the three most common causes are:

• Issues with PHP memory limits (there's some stuff about that here).

I'm spending quite a bit of time writing and reviewing patches for Drupal 7 at the moment. The installation process is great, but there are still a couple of bits of repetitive work that I had to do every time I installed, like setting permissions and creating folders.

I've written a couple of bash scripts to automate this. Put them in the next level up from your drupal 7 site's root: for example, if your drupal7 install is at /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs/drupal7, put the scripts in /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs.

I'm developing a module that gives fine-grained user profile permissions: see http://drupal.org/node/546188 for more information.

The attached zip file is the 0.0.0.1 dev release of the User Profile Access module - totally untested, pretty hacky and potentially dangerous; use at your own risk. I'll post newer version as I develop the module. Eventually I'd like to get a proper contrib module on CVS, but as this module requires patching user.module I'll have to wait a little while for that.

Edit: make sure to download version 2 of Tutor Allocate - the first version I uploaded inlcuded the firep() function, which is used with Drupal for Firebug but throws up error messages if Drupal for Firebug isn't installed. Version 2 has all references to firep() removed.

I've written four custom modules as part of the big Drupal site I'm working on. Two of these modules are very site-specific (one does a load of validation for the custom content types the site uses; the other one displays a hard-coded View which is really only relevant to the site it was written for). The other two might be useful for other projects, so here they are.