Module development and code questions

I've been a drupal site user/admin for over a year and have found all kinds of great things to use it for. Just upgraded my site to 4.5.2 and I have to say it doesn't leave me wanting for much. There are a few things I wish it could do so I figured it was about time to roll up my sleves and dive in...

The first thing I am attempting to do is to make the archive.module block and page blogcentric - that is to say context sensitive to the currently displayed blog. I've managed to hack archive.module using some keen xtreme programming methodology (read: 5 nights trial and error) and have actually got it to work - however it's pretty ugly. I'd like to a) clean up the code using more drupalese syntax b) perhaps port to a seperate module as that seems the way to do things properly 'round here

1) Ok so the first thing I did was put !^blog\/([0-9]*)! into the block path for archive (neat trick that) so the calendar only shows up on the blog pages.

2) Next, in the archive_calendar function I added a preg_match to hack out the user id of the current blog from $_GET['q'] like this:

// get the users uid from the url
preg_match("/^blog\/([0-9]*)/",$_GET['q'],$blog_uid);

I didn't like this much but I couldn't figure out how to get at the $uid variable or the $node->$uid attribute from the archive module. Is there a better way to do this than what I have above?

3) from there it is a simple matter of changing the SQL to include a peek at the n.uid so as to pull out only nodes for the current blog's user

Trying to figure out a way to do something once per session regardless of whether or not a user has logged in. Have tried setting a variable in the $_SESSION array, but it does not appear to be saved from one page/screen to the next. Any ideas on how to do this? BTW, I'm running Drupal 4.5.0

Thanks!

Radi Shourbaji
http://radi-shourbaji.profconnect.org

at end of filter.module function _filter_autop($text) must be updated:


function _filter_autop($text) {
$text = preg_replace('|\n*$|', '', $text) ."\n\n"; // just to make things a little easier, pad the end
$text = preg_replace('|
\s*
|', "\n\n", $text);
$text = preg_replace('!(<(?:table|ul|ol|li|pre|form|blockquote|h[1-6])[^>]*>)!', "\n$1", $text); // Space things out a little
$text = preg_replace('!()!', "$1\n", $text); // Space things out a little
$text = preg_replace("/\n\n+/", "\n\n", $text); // take care of duplicates
$text = preg_replace('/\n?(.+?)(?:\n\s*\n|\z)/s', "

$1

at end of filter.module function _filter_autop($text) must be updated:

function _filter_autop($text) {
  $text = preg_replace('|\n*$|', '', $text) ."\n\n"; // just to make things a little easier, pad the end
  $text = preg_replace('|
\s*
|', "\n\n", $text);
  $text = preg_replace('!(<(?:table|ul|ol|li|pre|form|blockquote|h[1-6])[^>]*>)!', "\n$1", $text); // Space things out a little
  $text = preg_replace('!()!', "$1\n", $text); // Space things out a little
  $text = preg_replace("/\n\n+/", "\n\n", $text); // take care of duplicates
  $text = preg_replace('/\n?(.+?)(?:\n\s*\n|\z)/s', "
$1
\n", $text); // make paragraphs, including one at the end
  $text = preg_replace('|
\s*?
|', '', $text); // under certain strange conditions it could create a P of entirely whitespace
  $text = preg_replace("|
(

Hi all! Was wondering if anyone has worked out a way to provide an "automatic login" based on ip address, user-agent, etc. What I'm trying to do is provide a way for search engines to "login" to the site automatically so they can spider the "members" version of content.

Thanks!

Radi

I'm trying to figure out if there's anyway to hack a module (presumably the forum module) to make the titles of sticky posts bold. I found this function... but I'm not sure if there's a way to modify it so the "topics" class becomes "topics-sticky" if a post is sticky. That would enable a different style for sticky posts.