michael's blog

Ever since a client of mine asked me to look into the Firebug add-on YSlow, I've been interested in using it to increase performance on my Drupal (version 5) web sites. Wim Leer's recent posting about improving Drupal performance inspired me to take action to see what kind of improvements I could make.

Before I get into the details, please don't confuse me with an Apache guru. I know enough to modify various settings in an httpd.conf or an .htaccess file, but only after I've done my due diligence to make sure I'm not going to irrevocably screw things up.

Internet Explorer version 6 (IE6) is well known for its quirkiness - so much so that some HTML/CSS pros derive a good portion of thier income from helping other designers figure out how to work around its bugs.

A number of IE6's bugs have even been given cute little names to help offset the often violent reaction that developers have when they come across them. There's the "double border", the "3-pixel gap", the "guillotine", and the topic of this post - the "peek-a-boo" bug.

I recently came across an issue where I needed to figure out how to place a block-within-a-block on a Drupal site. The client was using a custom block to pull a random view from the database using a simple PHP script in the block body. The script was a rudimentary if-then statement that generated a random number then pulled a view based on it.

My task was to integrate a block with the pool of possible random views. Turns out it is pretty simple. In the block body (be sure you're using the PHP input format), to grab a view, you use this:

To modify this to pull a block, I used this:

I recently released the initial development version of a new Drupal module, DynoSearcho to the Drupal community.

The module allows site administrators to set up various DynoSearcho blocks on their site that allow their users to quickly find content using AJAX-like (AHAH, actually) functionality.

Each DynoSearcho block and be independently configured to search a particular node type (or multiple types) as well as the menu system. Furthermore, when searching for Organic Groups, the module will return additional descriptive information about the group. DynoSearcho is highly customizable from the block configuration page.

Thanks to Ozmosis for sponsoring this module.