Vancouver Tech Guy

Sorry about that folks. My posting schedule was hit hard by an exciting new project at Outcome3. Things should be back on track now. It's also my pleasure to announce a new addition Outcome3, Alexa Booth. She brings much needed design talent to our team - we're very excited about working with her.

A local venerable technology evangelist inspired me by actively trying out every contributed module in the Drupal project. While this task is probably out of the reach of any individual user, I'd like to make the attempt. At present, I count over 250 individual modules ready for the 5.x platform. I'm starting the month of Drupal module reviews tonight.

Best practices. For many, a four letter word followed by "change." Recently, best practices got full press with standard-compliant HTML and CSS webpages. Presto chango, a one click validator later, and best practices became the norm. Anyone trying to debug an AJAX widget can tell you, the best practices described by the W3C just works. Unfortunately, the same diligence is often ignored in areas outside of HTML, which is a big shame. Best practices evolve, and all areas of a business need to be actively assessing their own procedures for optimization.

One of the tasks I've been given recently is in helping other technology companies give back to the open source communities we all take so much joy in. On the flip side of the token, I have a number of customers who express incredulity at the thought of basing their beloved web project on open source software.

Now, a rough guide to getting started with 4.7 and the LiquidWiki is as follows:

1) Install the module
2) Add a new input format such as "wiki", making sure that the Liquid MediaWiki Filter is checked, and assign all the role types that should be able to input wiki-style content
3) Create a wiki page
4) Set the default content type to wiki page in the settings at /admin/liquid/settings
5) Set the default home page to your first wiki page
6) Start building

Now, this is a great theory... however, I suspect we're going to have a little bit of trouble with this particular formula...

We're going to assume that step 1 is done for now. All of the files exists, the database is inserted, and we can reach the Liquid settings in the admin. So let's jump to item number two.

Now that we've got all the files we need for a 5.0 module, it's time to get into the nitty gritty of changing code!

As a recap, our directory structure should look like:

...po (directory)
...README.txt
...mw_sanitizer.inc
...mw_parser.inc
...liquid_wikipage.module
...liquid_filters.module
...liquid.mysql
...liquid.module
...liquid.install
...liquid.info
...LICENSE.TXT

Now, go into Administer -> Modules (Under site building for those of you used to the old structure), and if everything has been setup properly, we see an option to install the wiki (you should see something like the following):

Background: LiquidWiki was a great attempt at getting wiki functionality into Drupal. Unfortunately, even in its native 4.7, users had problems installing it. I'm going to walk through the development process of converting LiquidWiki to 5.0. I hope this well help other developers (or even end users) in their quest for Drupal glory.

Our primary objective in this overhaul is to get Liquid working with 5.0, but we also want to make sure that we're using all of the nifty new features that help end users.

First, let's get LiquidWiki 4.7.x-1.x-dev from drupal.org (available here: liquidwiki)

The unpacked directory will look something like this:
...po (directory)
...README.txt