Dated posts

This tag is used when the contents of the post is now considered to be out of date, or at least not the contemporary way of doing things.

Projects for the new year

These are some project idea’s I’ve been sitting on all year and have not yet started, but hope to in the new year. 1. Python CMS framework in the vein of Drupal, based on Repoze BFG So Drupal is quite a popular community building framework, with good plugin system, and a data model which seems to work well. But I don’t think PHP is the way of the future, at least for me. I use Python for many other projects, I understand how to debug, unit test, etc. And BFG brings the really nice framework features from Zope and Plone, which makes it an ideal starting point. I’ve got a project plan for this which I’ll reveal when I get around to cutting some code. ...

ZSI -> CXF: Parameters coming in as NULL

Recounting a strange little compatibility issue I had between ZSI 2.0 and CXF 2.0.x. I was using CXF as the server, running from Maven using Jetty, and ZSI as the client. The parameters from the ZSI were arriving at the service implementation as null. With the web services logging turned on I could see that the SOAP packet was arriving OK, and looked good. A little bit of digging round the web turned up this message. The issue was that ZSI wasn’t explicitly namespacing the elements, and so CXF was not seeing them. The solution was to add elementFormDefault=“qualified” to my WSDL definition, and rebuild the ZSI stubs. ...

Hibernate, spring, and different jars

The situation is this. I had a working application which used Hibernate annotated classes, and JTA for data bindings, within a spring framework. Then I moved the annotated classes into a Jar file, and the application stopped working. Hibernate knew nothing about the classes because the PersistenceAnnotationBeanPostProcessor does not traverse into the JARS on the classpath. Further neither the entity manager or HibernateJpaVendorAdapter have options to specify the explicit paths to the classes. ...

Topic has moved on every forum post w/ fix.

On one of my sites which has been around since 4.6, and now runs 5.1 I was having an issue where all my forum posts ended up with “Topic has moved” messages, which pointed to nowhere (term/0). This seems to have been caused by us originally allowing multiple selections of forum topics. Of course the newest versions of Forum do no allow this, and prevent you from selecting this option. However it was still enabled on this site due to the migration path. So, a few SQL queries to fix the issue. First we need to fix the broken posts ...

Handy login hint

I had need to replace the standard “Access Denied” page in drupal with a login form, which is when I discovered that you can specify a message following the node/login path. IE, under Admin/Settings/Error Handling, my Default 403 page is now: user/login/Access was denied. Perhaps you need to login or register. So when someone doesn’t have an account and needs to be logged in they are presented with the message, and when they login will be sent back to the area they were trying to access. ...

Quick survey of useful Drupal 4.7 modules

All these modules are related to blogging, and information gathering, rather than social networking, or any of the other roles Drupal fulfills. Related Links The related links module allow you to specify external links which relate to the entry. It also, automatically extracts links from the body. These links can be displayed in a Related Links block, as well as those related by topic in the Related Topics block. The use of a multiline textarea to store the extra links, in HTML markup is a bit of a drawback. This has a couple of issues. One, if you have a Rich Text area installed it will stuff things up for you. And secondly, requiring the links to be in HTML is a bit of a drag for userfriendlyness. ...

SolarLibrary released

Well, after 2 days of development and testing, I’ve just released SolarLibrary 0.1. Along with this is a new, bug fix version of SolarCategories, which mainly deals with UI issues born out of never using my own interface :). So, SolarLibrary allows you to store and categories (with multiple categories) links, text, and files. The files are stored in a secure download behind SolarGroups authorization. I haven’t really tested this system on a wide range of people yet, but if nothing else, it offers a good example of what SolarGroups and SolarCategories are meant to do. Library notes are here. ...