Wim Leers Freelance Drupal Developer

I've been very quiet lately, which was especially noticeable on Drupal.org. Right now, I'm in the middle of my exam period (Computer Graphics exam next Wednesday), but as soon as I can (exams will be finished July 2nd), I will resume my Drupal work:

1. Finish Hierarchical Select 3 for Drupal 5
2. Port Hierarchical Select 3 to Drupal 6
3. Finally do that write-up of my svn system for deploying and maintaing Drupal sites (it's ready since last December, just didn't have the time to do the writing).
4. Finish the consolidation of the jCarousel and Panels Carousel Style modules into the Carousel module.
5. Make the current CDN Integration for Drupal 5 module scalable (i.e.: stop using a serialized array to keep track of synced files, which was good enough for development purposes, but painfully slow for production).
6. Also port the CDN integration module to Drupal 6.

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.

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.

At the end of 2007, my bank offered free personalized bank cards, meaning that you can put a photo on it. Only hours before the deadline passed (after this deadline, you'd have to pay, bah!), I thought about it. So I quickly started looking for something cool I could put on my bank card.