Last week, I described a technique to query and display nodes in all available translations. This worked well enough, but a performance-minded reader pointed out that the query generated by Views (that includes N self-joins for N enabled languages) would not scale to a large number of nodes.
My usual approach when implementing new ideas is to ensure the logic works first, and only handle optimization when needed. It's a strategy that has worked well for me in the past.
Here's a little puzzle: display a table of nodes, each row containing the same content in all available translations.
How would you do it? Stumped, I asked that question on Stack Overflow a few years ago, but never received a satisfactory reply.
Then, a couple of days ago, someone asked me if I had solved it. I hadn't thought of that puzzle since then, but I would have felt bad answering no. So, with 3 years of i18n work under my belt, I decided to give it another go.
I've needed to build a regular expression filter for a view I'm working on, so I'm sharing the code here because it might be helpful to other people as well. My specific case is that I am building a Blocks administration VBO.
Jeff Geerling graciously transferred his "Is there a module for that?" tongue-in-cheek domain name to me. Thanks Jeff!
So, IS there a module for that? Probably. But if not, the Drupal community is large and will help you. You can even ask me to do it for you :-)
I asked this question on StackExchange:
Is there a way to use Drupal Queue API to sequence the execution of tasks, like in a pipeline?
My use case is pretty simple: I have a number of tasks executing in the background, doesn't matter their order because they are self-contained. However, I'd like a single task (of a different type) to execute after all the others are done.
How would this be done?
Last week, I started writing about my tribulations managing the configuration of a multisite, multilingual application using Features, i18n, and friends. I listed the site components that needed to be managed, and described the basics of saving string translations in a feature.
This week, I'll describe a particularly challenging component I had to deal with: inoffensive-sounding menu items. Should be easy, right?
I received today a gift from my Amazon wish list - namely, the Cat Stevens - Footsteps in the Dark album. Since I couldn't tell from the packaging who purchased this item, I am posting here to tell you:
In my role as development team leader, I am responsible for the application architecture that allows other team members to focus on building functionality with minimum friction and rework. As such, one of my biggest tasks is to ensure that new features and configurations can be reliably deployed to the various stages: development, testing and production.
My current project is an Arabic/English application built on Drupal 7, that is deployed in multisite fashion to several partners.
Over the years, I've accumulated a large collection of e-books and digital music albums, not to mention family pictures. Information overload is not a philosophical point of view, it's a real problem that forces me to devote time, effort and money to maintain that collection.
That's probably why so many media organizers exist. Because I believe that all applications should be delivered from the Web, and because no ready-made Web media organizer struck me as fulfilling my needs, I started to write my own using Drupal 6, dubbed Mediatheque.
