code snippet

For the Brown University Featured Events website, I needed to develop a means to use their events for other purposes around the Brown.edu websites. I ultimately created a basic way of exporting iCal, RSS and HTML of a selected span of events.

As most Drupalers have realized, iCal support for Drupal is in its infancy. The first successful implementation of it was only realized at the beginning of 2007 in the calendar module. It still has a lot of limitations - there are issues with time zones, and a complete lack of customization that CCK offers.

I was tasked with maintaining a Drupal website that had 44 views. The template.php file for the theme was unwieldy. I spun off all the views template code into another file for ease of maintenance, but it was still 1333 lines¹ weighing in at 36.5kb! ^{[1] Just four more lines and it could have been elite!}

The quantity of views certainly wasn't pretty, and when I had to add in another view, I decided that enough was enough. It was time to clean it up and develop a system to help keep the views under control.

Recently, I had to make mass changes to nodes while adding a new feature to a live website.

In one case, I wanted to add a date field to a content type with hundreds of existing nodes. For the sake of simplicity, best date that could be used for this field was the created date of the node. With that information, I was able to write the following script to replace any empty date fields with the created date.

Here is a solid and secure, cross browser compatible three column layout. It can also be transformed into a two column layout on the fly by simply editing the body class and removing the unneeded column - big plus for content management systems!

• Supports absolute or percentage widths, sorry, no ems
• Search engine optimized with content (middle column) towards the top instead of the side columns
• Can float and clear floats in any column without breaking the layout
• Works in FF, Safari, IE 6, IE 7 and Opera