Drupal social publishing software

Working on the Forum Thread module I came across a bit of a challenge. On one user's site the call to add an inline javascript file (drupal_add_js()) was being called from nodeapi twice. Since it is calling inline javascript drupal_add_js happily puts the script on the page twice.

In this case the script in question calls a "toggle" function to hide and show the comments on a given forum node. Since the script was there twice it obediently displayed and then immediately hid the comment body. Evidently users aren't keen on this method of speed-reading.

The solution then is simple. Use an external .js file. However, in this case to make the module easy to configure I wanted to allow users the choice of which css element identifies a "comment title". (An aside that the way this works is to hide and show the siblings of the title which does impose some requirements about how the comment is formatted.) So this makes it more complex because I want to include the proper selector in the script and still include it in a file.

To accomplish this I ended up splitting the jQuery function into a couple of separate calls. The first, an inline script, does an addClass to the user-identified comment title class. Then a file-based javascript acts on the newly added class to hide and show the comments as a website user chooses on each page.

It is possible to see the results in action.

In a little Drupal surfing while waiting for the latest Lullabot podcast this morning I came across the recent University of Colorado website. It's great to see another university using Drupal and they are doing it in a big way.

Drupal founder and Acquia co-founder Dries Buytaert was named a most promising entrepreneur by Business Week magazine in their special report. Congratulations Dries on an honor well deserved.

Mollom moved from a private beta to public beta today. I've been fortunate enough to participate in the private beta and can say this stuff rocks. There are plenty of methods of protecting sites from spam and bad content, but this is by far the best so far. The problem with many systems is they treat legitimate users as the enemy. At least with traditional CAPTCHA systems is that they challenge the user for an answer before the user has provided any information to suggest they should be challenged. Users pay the penalty for the bad behavior of the spam bots. There are systems that work around this and some like Akismet have done pretty well on this site. The problem, however, with many of these services is that they can still be gamed to a greater extent. And, since the spambots don't recognize that their attempts to add content have been unsuccessful they merrily pound away on the server. The other methods also generally call for administrators to monitor things pretty closely. With all the great spam tools there would still be a couple of spam posts a week that would slip through on this site. During the transition to Mollom a bot was actually attempt to post. In the few seconds the site was unprotected a couple of posts slipped through. In the weeks since nary a errant post has been made (aside from one on an article which should not have been configured to accept comments but that wasn't spam).