ChEeTaH's - tContact

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!

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.