Wim Leers Freelance Drupal Developer

I'm late to the Mollom announcing party, because I was on a vacation. Nevertheless, I hope I can still interest some of you with a slightly different angle.

The major issue with spam prevention is that it often (currently virtually always) involves extra steps for normal users. And more steps means less participation. Less participation means less traffic. And less traffic means less popularity, revenue and whatnot. So clearly there is much to be gained to prevent spam without annoying normal users.

In about an hour we're leaving for the airport. I'm going to Mallorca! Yay :)

I will be staying with David Jennes, a good friend of mine. He's on a student exchange program (Erasmus) there, so I can stay with him for free. That's also why I can afford this. It's a really welcome vacation, too. The last trimester at the university has been pretty demanding, so I'll definitely enjoy doing things a bit slower. And of course the much warmer climate (it was 17-19 degrees Celsius there when it was snowing in Belgium the last couple of days…).

This also means that I'm going to be slow with catching up through my pile of e-mails from my exam period of the last 3 weeks. I thank you for your understanding :)

API

The API of the previous version of HS was a beast. Well, not the API, but the implementations. This has been fixed in version 2 of HS: it's now much more elegant and much easier. If you don't have to alter any forms, you can easily implement all hooks in less than a hundred lines, probably even less. The content_taxonomy implementation for example, is about 75 lines if you don't count the form altering. That should make HS much more attractive to other Drupal developers.

Support Hierarchical Select Dynamically

One of the low-hanging fruits is to support HS dynamically (i.e. use hierarchical select form items when HS is installed, use normal selects otherwise).

What is Hierarchical Select?

For those who don't know Hierarchical Select yet, or HS in short, this is a module that provides a new form element. If you're new to Drupal, you may just have frowned upon reading that. A 'form element' in Drupal's Forms API is something like a button, select or textarea element in HTML, or a GUI widget in a GUI.

Now, the goal of HS is actually very narrow: making selections in hierarchies (hence its name) really simple: improve usability. The prime example and candidate for this is of course Drupal's Taxonomy module. The idea is to first select an item from the root level, then pick one of its children (if it has any), then one of the children of the selected child (if it has any), and so on.

It's been almost a year since the last Apple Cinema Displays update. And that was just a price drop. So … what's taking Apple so long?

If you've been following all things Apple a bit lately, you'll definitely have noticed that they've been filing a lot of multi-touch technology patents. It's already on the iPhone, the MacBook Air and on the MacBook Pro soon.More interestingly however, it appears they're planning on bringing it to the desktop too!