Neither $search_form nor $search_box is available in Zen or, likely, any other themes in Drupal 7. Instead, there's a block.

If you need to print the search box in page.tpl.php, you'll need to render the block and then print it like so:

To break that down, 'search' is the module invoking the block. 'block_view' is the operation we want to call, that is, we want to view the block, and 'form' is the machine name of the block you want to print.

I work on a lot of legacy sites that were built without the Context module, and I would say that at least once on each of these legacy sites, I turn to Context when I have a very specific problem: the visibility settings for a particular block are so complex that (in Drupal 6 at least) they can only be expressed by writing code. For instance: suppose you're using Organic Groups, and you want to show or hide a block based on whether the user is a member of that group.

With the release of Lion, there are some subtle differences to setting up a local MAMP (Mac OS X, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment compared to Snow Leopard. In an effort to keep this from being overly wordy and just get to the good stuff, we'll dive right in, so read on to get started.

Drupal seven broke out the old hook_block($op = 'list', $delta = 0, $edit = array()) function, which took an operation as an argument, into four functions, hook_block_info, hook_block_save, hook_b

I'm building some maps for a client using the GMap module and came across the following simple problem: using a GMap macro, how do you remove a default attribute?

The GMap module lets you set a number of default attributes for your maps: width, height, center position, initial zoom, and so on. If you want to change any of the default settings for a given map, you need to specify your overrides in a GMap macro, which looks something like this:

[gmap zoom=3| width=500px |height=350px]

It's all simple enough until you get to the behaviors.

Sometimes a few characters of code can make all the difference in the world. All coders know the scenario: the code looks fine, all the right values are in the right place, the code validates or compiles (or at least looks like it should), but when we run it we get...nada. Maybe the source of the problem is a comma following an array declaration (fine in PHP, but can be a killer in JS), an extra "$" in a variable name, or - as in the case of trying to define a callback for jQuery libraries like jCarousel using JSON - an extra pair of quotes around the callback function value.

Unfortunately, the difference of a few quotes is not always so easily overcome. In the case of extraneously quoted JSON function values, for instance, the issue originates from within the drupal_add_js function and PHP's own json_encode. Such situations can lead to desperate measures: grabbing the drupal_get_js output and munging it with regular expressions or other hackish means to make it do what we need. While use of such techniques is something of a religious dispute among Drupalists, I'm happy to announce that there's also another way to tackle JSON callbacks in Drupal, with nothing more out-of-line than drupal_add_js and a bit of simple jQuery magic.

In Context 3 they removed the sitewide default context, that is, the context that can be set to be enabled when no other context is active. The sitewide context, which is enabled at all times, is still available.

But, in its place, Dev Seed has added a very powerful feature, sneakily powerful, in fact.

You can set a context to be active using another context. Seeming kind of meh? Well, read on. You will soon see, young apprentice, just as I did just earlier today.

First, name all the contexts you DON'T want this context to coincide with in a regularized way, like

Want to contribute back to the Drupal community? Don't be afraid, Git is not as hard as you might think. There are plenty of resources available to those who search. Drupal recently switched over to Git from CVS. Much of the documentation on Drupal.org is out of date, so if you see documentation related to CVS, remember that Drupal now uses Git.

This post will serve as a way of helping you to get involved in the Drupal community and contributing modules back.

Get Git Access

Here's a one-liner to dump each table in a database to it's own .sql file. Crack open your shell of choice and follow along.