Drupal

Someone asked my this personally and I thought, instead of answering directly, I could write down what I know in a blog post. Note that this is my personal opinion, you might disagree and are welcome to provide suggestions in the comments.

So you started using Drupal or are already using it for quite some time to create websites. And you want to contribute something back because you can use Drupal and all these modules for free.

These are just a few screenshots for the properties project.

I'm back from DrupalCon Copenhagen and I thought it's time for a more or less short summary of what happened.

My blog has been silent for too long, it's time for some updates!

Drupal

I am currently on position 15 of the top contributors for Drupal 7. That means that 81 of my patches were commited (which also means that I have written a lot more since many patches usually require multiple iterations until they are good enough). Because of that, I was mentioned in Dries Keynote presentation at DrupalCon SF and some other blogs (german only):

More than a year ago, I needed a module which allows users to send private messages for a newly created Drupal 6 website. So I stumbled over Privatemsg. However, back then, it was an early development release which missed many features, had some bugs and so on. So I decided to help improving it.

7 weeks ago and probably hundreds of patches later (but still no stable release!), litwol made me a co-maintainer of the module which allowed me to commit patches myself.

DBTNG is the new database abstraction layer of Drupal 7. It uses several OOP principles and provides far more features than Drupal 6 did.

Most queries need to be slighty changed to work with DBTNG, this blog post will explain some of the most common conversions.

Simple SELECT queries

Most queries don't need much work. Usually, two things need to be done:

I've written quite a few patches for Drupal in the last few months, but most of them were either bugfixes or ideas/patches/tasks of others I've taken further.

Recently, I proposed the first patch, that was my own idea : http://drupal.org/node/450666.

DBTNG does have the nice concept of Extenders, which are essentially a standardized Decorator pattern. You can use them to provider additional functionality to the SelectQuery class, which can build a SELECT Query with a OOP-QueryBuilder.

So, I decided to start a blog again, after my last try was discontinued after Japan. I'll use it to publish some information about myself and primarly about some open source projects I'm working on.

As a start, I'm using the site to publish the API Documentation of the Drupal module privatemsg. However, it's a work in progress, and it isn't really useful yet, I'm planning to improve it in the near future.