Today I released a very useful module for masking parts of your content for certain roles, users or even organic groups. It is based on Wordpress's shortcode API and must be used in combination with a text format in Drupal.

Drush is a very powerful instrument in the toolbox of a Drupal developer. But it can give you a little headache when trying to install in your local MAMP setup. Also because I had forgotten how to do it within my fresh installation of MAMP Pro, a quick and relatively simple tutorial on how to install Drush.

Maybe as you guessed from my previous post, I develop on a Mac with MAMP. I really like the interface of the pro version compared to other programs like XAMPP. But it seems very difficult to install PEAR extensions with it. This post will explain how to install the MongoDB extension, but I guess this technique can be applied to a lot of other extensions too.

Today I discovered a very handy piece of code I wasn’t aware of till now. With this code, it’s very easy to get an array filled with all characters in the alphabet.

My current MAMP version ships with phpMyAdmin version 3.3.9.2. But there is already a higher version available, version 3.4.10.1. Upgrading the shipped phpMyAdmin to the latest version appears to be very easy. Just downloading and extracting it to the correct folder.

For a better user experience on node crud actions, I've installed the WYSIWYG module with the CKEditor plugin. It adds the CKEditor interface as a filter for large textfields. And by default it loads in CKEditor's predefined styles. Very nice for beginners, but what if you want to include your own theme styles? The WYSIWYG editor supports loading your stylesheets, but works a bit buggy on the latest version (2.1 on time of writing this) in combination with the CKEditor. Luckily I found a very quick fix for this issue.

When you start developing themes, you'll find out that there will be a lot of stylesheets loaded in by default. To remove those stylesheets from your own theme's template.php, you have to overwrite hook_css_alter and remove the stylesheets from the array. To make things a bit clearer, take a look at the following snippet:

Most of the time, when you are developing web applications, you make use of multiple environments. For example, a development, staging and production environment. But how do you configure each environment separately? One solution is a multi-site installation with Wordpress, but I didn't see that one fit into my development process.