Drupal

Recently I had a need to make a consent form, basically to show some big block of legalese text before a text field where the user sign. And on display, show that same text and the value of the text field. Something like this:

But CCK fields just don't have any way to include lengthy text. They can have help text which are displayed below the input in gray text. The second problem is I need this text to be shown when the page is displayed but the various modules I found (markup, form_markup) do not show anything on output. So I created the nodeincck module to solve this need.

Drupal core comes with two input formats: Filtered HTML and Full HTML. Filtered HTML format lets both authenticated and anonymous users enter comments and contents safely by limiting the allowed HTML tags to a very limited set with the HTML Filter. Full HTML is indented for admin use only because it allows any HTML tags and attributes to be used. WYSIWYG editors make use of many more tags and attributes to satisfy the full range of format options. Since the HTML Filter is only capable of allow or dis-allow of HTML tags, it is inadequate for complete safety because Wysiwyg editors make use of a large range of HTML tags and attributes. But for safty from XSS and other attacks, HTML tags and and attributes must be very precisely controlled so the Wysiwyg editor can safely render full range of styling format. The Wysiwyg Filter precisely satisfy this need: it lets you specify exactly what tags and what attributes are allowed in such a way that gives you the full rang of HTML tags and attributes required by the Wysiwyg editors and yet keeping the format completely safe. It's a replacement of the built-in HTML Filter.

Pattern and suggestion theme template can reside in the theme directory only. What if you want to provide pre-built override templates out of your module and not require copying them into the theme directory. This way, module is self contain and theme can be left untouched. This makes installing and upgrading theme and module easier. Of course, user can still override these template inside theme.

The Content Construction Kit (CCK) lets you define custom content type with many different kinds of data fields. The default display and input form are generic looking and may not be the way you like. But the look of the node output and the node edit form are completely customizable. I will illustrate how to do this by making change to the active theme. But at the end, I will show how to do this from a module, which is a better approach because it's not married to the active theme. This is better for site maintenance and allows you to freely switch theme.

Here is a Drupal module to provide a dynamic [Login][My account][Log out] menu. Before the user is logged in, the menu shows only [Log in]. After, the menu change to [My account][Log out]. This is an alternative to the "User login" block. Maybe you do not want the "User login" block on every page, taking up valuable space and grabbing user attention away from your contents.