My First Drupal Module

By mike@mike-miles.com

Recently while working on a drupal website for a client, I needed to build in some custom functionality.  For drupal this is’nt an issue, basically anything you need to do has been done before and you can find a module in the module directory.

But after searching I was unable to find a module that did what I wanted, so I had to develope one (Which for a nerd like me was really fun).  It took me a day or two to build, and refine but I built a module that I was happy with.

The great thing about Drupal is that it’s all open source, and anything built for drupal is covered under the GNU license. Drupal thrives on user submitted content and projects, so I decided I would submit my module to give back to the community.  Submitting a module is a bit of a process, you need to submit a proposal, get approved, create an account and create a project page.  The Drupal moderators must of liked my module thou, because it was approved!

So I now have my first (hopefully of many) official Drupal module available for download on the Drupal website.

Now for the good part, here is all the info on the module:

Callouts

Callouts creates a way to display multiple blocks that are related by taxonomy terms. After you place the module into a region on your site, when a user goes to a page any callout blocks (callout is a new content type) with the same taxonomy terms as that page will be displayed in the region.

This Module is great if your looking to show related products in an e-commerence environment, or announcements depending on what page of the site your users are on.

You can downlaod the module for your drupal installation at http://drupal.org/project/callouts

Working hard

By mike@mike-miles.com

Sorry for the lack of updates, I’ve been quite busy at my job (doing some major web development stuff). I’m going to try to post later this week about a PHP calendar/date class I’ve been building in my freetime (initial tests are showing that for some instances it’ll be up to 4x faster then the ‘date()’ function.) so hopfully you’ll see that later in the week

PointsWatcher

By mike@mike-miles.com

So this post is mainly just to gloat.

I’ve finished my iPhone app, PointsWatcher! (www.PointsWatcher.com) In case you havent checked out my projects page, here is a quick run down of the app for you.

Recently I started doing WeightWatchers with my girlfriend (moral support and what not), but being the technophile that I am I wanted to incorporate my iPhone with it.  The result was PointsWatcher.  PointsWatcher allows you to keep track of your daily ww Points and an inventory of the food you eat, it also features a points calculator!

So basically it takes alot of the effort out of figuring out point values for your food (and allows you to store point values for future use).

It’s web based, so you can access it from anywhere, but the interface is formatted for use on the iPhone.

You can read the full description about this project here , or check out pointwatcher at its site www.PointsWatcher.com