ChEeTaH's

MacDesperate now Online!

ChEeTaH — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:56:41 +0000

After quite a long time (well over a year), we finally launched MacDesperate last Sunday. We are me, Rosana, Alex and Wouter. Of course, MacDesperate is powered by Drupal. Rosana and Wouter are saving up for macs - they're the real MacDesperates - and my Donation Goals module helps them keep track of their progress. The first donations are already in. Now it's time for you to support them! Don't hesitate and go to MacDesperate.com! We've got goodies!

Drupal Development made easier with Qt Assistant - Part 2

ChEeTaH — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:36:49 +0000

In the previous part of this walk-through, we installed the necessary software to get our Drupal API documentation in Qt Assistant. The next step is to actually generate the documentation so we can browse through it, search it and more. If you haven't done so already, read part 1 so you're sure to have the right software.

Creating a Doxyfile

The first thing we need to do is creating a configuration file for Doxygen. This will contain instructions for Doxygen about the formats you want the documentation to be in, where to get the documentation from, etc. I'll show the settings in the graphical tool, doxywizard. Of course it's also possible to let the doxygen command generate the file for you so you can edit it manually (with a text editor). Either way is fine. If you want to use the Doxyfile generated through this tutorial straight away, scroll to the bottom of this post to download it.

So, let's start the Doxygen wizard. You should find this in your launcher menu, probably under the Development submenu, or you can just run doxywizard from a terminal. The window you get presented asks you, as a first step, to select the working directory. Point this to your Drupal directory. For me this would be /home/cheetah/public_html/drupal.api. Now, as we want to set some advanced settings, we skip straight to the Expert tab to configure everything.

The first things to pay attention for are the PROJECT_NAME ("drupal"), PROJECT_NUMBER ("6" or whichever Drupal version you're working with), and the OUTPUT_DIRECTORY settings. For the last setting, creating a new place for Doxygen to dump its files in is the easiest way to prevent the Doxygen output from cluttering your Drupal installation. I've put it in a doxygen subdirectory ("/home/cheetah/public_html/drupal.api/doxygen"). You'll probably also want to enable the REPEAT_BRIEF and ALWAYS_DETAILED_SEC as well. The STRIP_FROM_PATH setting should be empty, but it also doesn't hurt to enter the base directory of your Drupal installation (this way, if your run Doxygen outside the Drupal directory, it'll still properly strip the path from the filenames). I've also enabled the QT_AUTOBRIEF and OPTIMIZE_OUTPUT_FOR_C options.

There's a final important setting on the Project topic, which is the EXTENSION_MAPPING. Generally, Drupal uses *.php, *.module and *.inc filenames for code. However, we need to tell Doxygen that these are PHP files. Add "module=PHP" and "install=PHP" (according to the documentation, you should omit the "." in front of the extension).

Next tab is the Build topic. We want to get all the documentation, so we extract ALL, PRIVATE, STATIC, LOCAL_CLASSES and LOCAL_METHODS. The SHOW_DIRECTORIES setting may be useful to have the directory structure visible in the documentation. We skip straight to the Input topic, and add our Drupal directory as INPUT setting. Important is the FILE_PATTERNS setting: this tells Doxygen which files contain documentation. The *.php and *.inc should normally already be in there, but for Drupal add the *.module and *.install patterns as well. This way Doxygen should extract documentation from most if not all of the code files in Drupal (unfortunately Doxygen doesn't work well with Javascript).

Also enable the RECURSIVE option, otherwise you'll need to tell Doxygen explicitly which directories it should look in for documentation, in the INPUT setting. If you keep a directory with backups of old modules within the Drupal directory, enter its path in the EXCLUDE setting (e.g. "backup"). As EXCLUDE_PATTERNS some useful entries may be */CVS/*, */.svn/*, */.git/* (so Doxygen skips version-controlled directories), plus */settings.php and */*.settings.php to ignore site-specific settings files.

Next up is the HTML topic, in which we configure the HTML output Doxygen generates. Yes, we want to generate HTML (switch on GENERATE_HTML) in the html subdirectory (HTML_OUTPUT) with the .html extension for the files (HTML_FILE_EXTENSION). Now a very important setting to generate the Qt Help files, which Qt Assistant uses. Switch on GENERATE_QHP. For QCH_FILE, which just became enabled, set drupal-6.qch (or just drupal.qch, or replace the 6 with the version of Drupal you're working with). Set the QHP_NAMESPACE to org.drupal.6 (again, replace the version number). Set all as the QHP_VIRTUAL_FOLDER - this will come in handy later. Also set the filter settings: QHP_CUST_FILTER_NAME to "Drupal 6 (all)", and set both QHP_CUST_FILTER_ATTRS and QHP_SECT_FILTER_ATTRS to drupal drupal-6. Finally, we set the path to the "qhelpgenerator" program ("qhelpgenerator.exe" on Windows, I assume) in the QHG_LOCATION setting. This is probably something like "/usr/bin/qhelpgenerator" or "C:/Qt/bin/qhelpgenerator.exe". Leave the other settings at their defaults (DISABLE_INDEX off, GENERATE_TREEVIEW to none, etc.).

Finally, head to the LaTeX, RTF, Man and XML topics, and turn output for each of these off. We won't be using these. Finally, if you want to, enable or disable class diagrams on the Dot topic. This will make a difference for some contributed modules (mostly Views).

First Run

We're all set now, so let's run Doxygen! Go to the Run tab, click the Run doxygen button and let it do its work. When it's done (don't close the Doxygen Wizard until I tell you to!), click "Show HTML Output" and your browser will start with the Drupal documentation right at your hands. Unless you excluded the "sites" subdirectory, you also get all the documentation of contributed modules as well. You may notice some problems with broken links (e.g. the Form API reference etc), and the documentation is a little bit messy if you have many contributed modules. We'll solve these problems in the next part. First, let's exit the wizard. It will ask us to save the configuration. Save it under its default name (that would be "/home/cheetah/public_html/drupal.api/doxygen/Doxyfile" in my case). You'll find the sample file created in this tutorial at the bottom of this post.

Last step for today is loading up the Qt Assistant with our documentation. This will require using a terminal/command line. First make sure you know where Qt Assistant is located. The program is called just assistant, so for most platforms you should be able to find it using which assistant on the terminal. On Windows, look in your Qt installation path, in the bin directory. Now decide for a location for your Qt Help Collection file. Create an empty file with any name you like (e.g. drupal-6.qhc). You can use the touch command to do so, or by creating an empty file in that directory using your file manager (that would be the way to go for Windows users; use Explorer or Notepad and create the empty file. Make sure the extension is .qhc and not .txt or something else!). Now, assuming you've chosen the filename to be drupal-6.qhc in your home directory (and your username is cheetah) enter in a terminal:

/usr/bin/assistant -collectionFile /home/cheetah/drupal-6.qhc

You can also just set up a shortcut to do this, of course. You should see an empty Qt Assistant:

As long as this is the first time you're starting up the assistant with this file, you can head to the Edit > Preferences menu. Go to the Documentation tab, click Add... and add the drupal-6.qch file created by Doxygen (this will be in the doxygen/html directory within your Drupal installation, if you followed this tutorial). Qt Assistant will start updating its indexes, and you get to see and search your documentation:

You'll find out that once you restart the assistant with the same collectionFile parameter, the Documentation tab will disappear from the preferences, even after removing and recreating the file. If this happened, you can still register and unregister help files from the collection file, from the command line as follows (change the filenames etc. of course):

assistant -collectionFile drupal-6.qhc -register /home/cheetah/public_html/drupal.api/doxygen/html/drupal-6.qch

To remove the help file from the collection again:

assistant -collectionFile drupal-6.qhc -unregister /home/cheetah/public_html/drupal.api/doxygen/html/drupal-6.qch

These commands will tell you if something useful happened, but won't actually start the assistant. Restart the assistant with just the collectionFile parameter again to just see the documentation.

Note that as long as the Qt Compressed Help file (the one generated by Doxygen) stays in the same place, you should be able to update it and see the changes in the assistant if you ever recreate the documentation. The assistant will automatically recreate its index and take care of such updates for you. Knowing that, you can create an icon that fires up the assistant for you, with the Drupal help loaded, so you can get that quick documentation access. Just use the above command above the empty assistant screenshot. Make sure you do give the proper path to the collection file!

Updates

If you ever want to update the documentation (for example because you added more contributed modules, updated Drupal to a newer version, etc), regenerate it with Doxygen. You can use the wizard to open the Doxyfile you saved, rerun Doxygen and the assistant should show the updated documentation after you start it again. It's as simple as that. Alternatively, using a terminal, head to your Drupal directory (or wherever you stored the Doxyfile) and simply call doxygen. As long as you've explicitly set the INPUT setting above, then run doxygen /path/to/Doxyfile and so you can even use a different filename for your Doxygen configuration. Of course you can also play with the various Doxygen settings, rerun doxygen, and you'll also get the documentation with the new settings in Qt Assistant.

Of course you don't have to use a separate collection file (*.qhc) for each version of Drupal you have. You can put each version of Drupal in the same assistant. Now if you made sure you have different namespaces (hence we placed the version numbers in the configuration), you should be able to filter per version at the top of the UI.

Summary

Last time all we did was install the necessary software. This time we actually used it all in the most basic way, with success: the Qt Assistant now displays the Drupal documentation. This should be enough to get you started finding all the information of the Drupal API that you need. There are still some problems with broken links to special topics, there's no way to filter out specific module information, and so on.

With the major steps taken, next time I'll dig a little deeper in fixing the most painful problems. It probably won't be as much work as this part. See you next time!

Attachment	Size
Doxyfile.	62.83 KB

Donation Goals module at Drupal

ChEeTaH — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 20:30:03 +0000

Yesterday I wrapped up some work I've been putting into a Drupal module recently, for a site that's probably launching before the end of the year (not putting any pressure on anyone here!). It's called "Donation Goals" and can be grabbed from the Donation Goals Project page.

With Donation Goals you can make a new type of content in your Drupal site. You guessed it, a "Donation Goal". Enter some details, especially how much money you need, open it up and make sure you get some visitors. They can donate money to you, through PayPal, helping you reach your goal.

The module keeps track of all donations (as long as they're made through the site) and even allows you to build some fancy overviews of all donations (Views FTW!). If you saved some money yourself, you could of course pay it yourself through PayPal. The easier way is to just add the money to the current savings and let the module do the work for you (saving you the PayPal fees that you might have to pay otherwise).

There are some similar modules (Bounty, Donation and ChipIn) available, but they all take a somewhat different approach, or they are completely abandoned.

While a first development version is out, the module probably still has some features to add, things to change and bugs to fix. Try it out from drupal.org/project/donation_goals and let me know what you think!

Drupal Development made easier with Qt Assistant - Part 1

ChEeTaH — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:53:23 +0000

If you've followed my blog for even the smallest bit, you'll know I have KDE 4 as my desktop environment. I've also done quite some development (mostly messing around so far, just tContact is published) for Drupal. One of the main tools to help me during development is the Qt Assistant, which comes with Qt 4 and later. It's a fast documentation viewer, with a great index making it easy to look up all those little details about each function that's available in Qt4... or Drupal. Let me show you how I've set things up...

Oh, and if you're not that into all this techy stuff: feel free to stop reading, of course.

Some quick notes

First of all: this guide is focused on getting the Drupal API in the Qt Assistant, but it should work for pretty much any C++/PHP/Java/Python project etc. which Doxygen can handle. See the Doxygen website for details on how to document your code et cetera. Unfortunately I have not been able to get the PHP documentation itself integrated in Qt Assistant yet.

I will also be using some scripts to be run from a terminal or shell. This should not be much of a problem for you Linux or Mac users, for Windows it might be necessary to get CygWin. Unfortunately I haven't tried all of this from Windows, so if someone can jump in and post useful/necessary tips for Windows users in the comments, that would be helpful.

Preparing your system

Well, you're still here. First thing to do is to install Qt4. You get it from QtSoftware.com for pretty much any platform. Get the LGPL/Free version of the Framework or SDK. Note that on Linux it'll very likely come with the repositories of your distribution, you may just need to install the -dev or -devel packages.

Next, get a copy of Drupal from Drupal.org and extract it somewhere on your hard drive. You can of course use your existing Drupal installation full with all the modules you like, or just whichever product you want to use in combination with the Assistant (as long as you have access to the source code). You can do this several times for any version of Drupal, so you can even get separate access to your Drupal 5, 6 and 7 documentation. The choice is yours. No need to actually install it, just make sure the source is available.

For Drupal you'll also want to pull the Developer documentation from CVS. These contain some special help pages like the FAPI Reference and more, as well as documentation about all the hooks (hook_* functions). I won't repeat the exact instructions on how to get the documentation. Just follow the instructions at drupal.org.

Finally, get Doxygen (www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/). For Linux users: this is probably also in your distribution's repositories. This is the tool that will extract the documentation from your source code, and place it in useful HTML files - and finally in Qt Assistant too.

Qt Assistant - A Quick Look

Now that we have the necessary software installed, you could just take a quick peek at what Qt Assistant does for Qt. You should find it in your launcher/start menu/wherever (Mac: /Developer/Applications/Qt), or just by running "assistant" from the terminal. Go ahead and try it, you should see something similar to this:

Now let's look up the documentation of a function we know (part of) the name of: aboutQt(). Hit the Index tab on the left, enter about and you'll see a list of matching declarations (as well as some more generic topics). Double click aboutQt and Qt Assistant will prompt you to choose in which topic you want to look, QApplication or QMessageBox. I've opted for QApplication in the screenshot below, some actual documentation!

Finally one feature I don't use as often, but which is lightning fast: the Search. You'll find this tab on the right, just above the documentation. Searching for "about" will give you something like below, very useful if you only know the general topic of something you need:

Play around a bit and if you're daring: see if you can already get your Drupal documentation in there. That's what's coming up in the next part - the entire Drupal (and contributed) API, without even mixing it up with the Qt documentation.

Looky! Fixes!

ChEeTaH — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:56:05 +0000

Look here! My Lovely Rosana (MissDesign) has made the site work a bit better due to some extra theming (BIG Thank you to her!). This was actually done a couple of weeks ago already. I have just fixed some old content so that it's all alright again (she had to break screenshots and the like during the updates, but they're fixed now). Some of the improvements include less flickering of the menu buttons, comments have been themed, and a whole lot more smaller fixes. Also, I've just put the Lightbox module on this site, which means images now no longer replace the website, but are put in a nice overlay. I even have slideshows! I promise, I'll blog again very soon!

tContact at Drupal.org!

ChEeTaH — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:18:45 +0000

I've talked about it before... but today it's finally happened! I got a CVS account for Drupal.org a week or two ago. I postponed actually using it for a bit due to exams, but I just put it to some good use. Got a Drupal site and need your contact forms in multiple languages? Meet tContact! Version 6.x-1.0 is now officially out in the wild!

BSc Computer Science Almost Complete!

ChEeTaH — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:26:13 +0000

I had exams the last two weeks, one of which was for my Bachelor's degree. The last one for that degree too - just one more course which I'll have to do (online) over the summer. The course: "Semantiek & Berekeningsmodellen" ("Semantics and Computation Models"). The good news came in today: I passed. Score: 7/10. That means I'll most likely have my degree by the end of the summer. Woot! Of course, a screenshot for some proof (click to enlarge):

Where have you been?

ChEeTaH — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:57:35 +0000

It's been a long time again, very long. A lot has changed too, so here goes...

First of all: I got a job in February. It's not the greatest thing, but getting something really nice is hard right now. At least it relieves us a bit from the huge financial burden we'd otherwise have. Another small job at my university, where I worked for only 4 hours each week, is ending this month. I'll have my last paycheck from there soon, unfortunately.

I've also prepared the tContact Drupal module for release. The code has been slightly improved, which is always good. There's also another mini-module for Drupal which allows you to add CSS classes to menu links. This makes it easier for a theme to turn a menu into a series of buttons, similar to the menu at the top of this site (Home/About/Contact). Right now this site uses the menu item's ID number, which is somewhat random. With this module such menus are just a little harder to break :) I hope both modules will land on Drupal.org soon.

What else? KidDraw of course. A few months ago already, I've cleaned up a lot of code, made it a little bit themeable (which resulted in removing a whole lot of code). I've also changed the file loading/saving structures around so that the files KidDraw produces are nice straightforward XML files. They're compressed to save some disk space, but it means that compatibility with future and past versions is much easier. Still, a release is not in sight right now, and I'll stop predicting/hoping anything right now. First I've got some other stuff to finish and wrap up, before I can focus on KidDraw a little more again.

I'm also working on some supersecret projects with Rosana, which has taken some time off of other projects. It has inspired me to write the menu CSS classes module mentioned above though.

Another technical bit I worked on this past weekend is merging all the (5) Drupal installations on this webserver to a single centralized installation. Before, a new version of Drupal would mean updating each site separately: putting the site in maintenance mode, uploading files, updating the database and turning the site back online. Times 5. Right now: Put all sites in maintenance mode, upload files, update all databases, put them all back online. I've set up bookmark folders in Firefox so I can put all sites into maintenance mode with just a few clicks. Same goes for updating and bringing them back online. A similar amount of effort is saved for updates of common modules among various sites. All in all: maintaining the sites is less painful - especially as the amount of Drupal sites we're running will soon grow.

That does mean that if you spot any errors (missing/broken images, links, etc): please contact me! I think I've most of them covered though.

And then there's University of course. It's taking a lot of my time right now, with this year's last set of exams just around the corner. Together with some more deadlines, it's a busy time right now.

The Sims 3 is also out, I've been playing it for a bit. Not much yet - too little time. The (Collector's Edition) box is shiny though.

Spore Galactic Adventures, the first real expansion for Spore, is due next week, and Thursday (18th) me and Rosana will be checking it out at EA Netherlands. A bit late for a preview, but it may just be early enough to get me excited about the game once again. I don't know all too much about it right now, so Wednesday evening I'll have to do some reading to catch up on it.

Finally: I'll be getting a new laptop this summer. After saving up for a long time, the €1000 offer from university (for a HP Elitebook 8530w) is in. I've filled in the form saying I want it, I'll have to pay up soon. I should be getting it around August. My current laptop (6 years old) just doesn't cut it anymore...

That's it for this rough summary of the past couple of months (project/work wise anyway). Until next time!

Contact Form Translated

ChEeTaH — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:33:28 +0000

Using my very own module, the contact form is now also translated in Dutch (I know, it's not really useful to tell this on the English version of the site, but I thought I'd just inform everybody). It's using my own tContact Drupal module, in which I have found a flaw and a to do. I'll have to fix those before I believe I can publish it. I'll keep you posted!

Happy New Year

ChEeTaH — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:49:14 +0000

Boy, it's been a while. Merry Christmas and a happy new year! Better late than never :P I've been really busy, and I'm wrapping up a too busy semester with finals now. Time for some plans.

I'll follow up my last post with some sad news: KidDraw didn't make it to KDE 4.2. The reason: time. As I said: busy semester, but also plenty of other things to work on which left KDE a bit too much on the side.

However things are more stable in KDE land now: KDevelop4 is coming along great making it actually usable for me. I also don't have Akregator (my feed reader) crashing on me all the time anymore. Now KDE 4.2 is just around the corner and I've decided to stick to that branch now, rather than running trunk all the time as I've done the past year.

Running such an unstable version of my favorite desktop is nice: you constantly get all the new features that everybody implements. However, it occasionally led to a broken desktop with crashes all over the place. I'm opting for better stability and more productivity this new year. I now run a KDE version from trunk, just before RC1, and will switch to KDE 4.2 once it's out.

I will be getting new computer parts too, and with 4Gb of memory I think it's also the time to switch to a 64bit OS (I still run Gentoo 32 bit now). That means a complete reinstall of everything I have, which is exactly what I'll be doing soon. With KDE 4.2.

So, I hope I can do more this semester so KidDraw will make it to KDE 4.3 in about 6 months. I've also got a few Drupal modules planned, one of which I wrote last night and mostly needs cleaning up before I'll throw it up here: a multilingual site-wide contact form. I'll also apply to get it on Drupal.org soon.

There you have it. A few of my plans for 2009. I hope I'll be able to get it all done.