The WGBH.org Development Blog

Happy May!

Hard to believe we’re already into the shortest (letter-wise) month of the year, isn’t it? After a fine week off last week to spend quality time with the kids (is there any other kind?), I’ve been back in the saddle working away on this little Drupal project we’ve got going on (think of it as the Big Dig of coding).

While I was away my friend Pete got himself fully immersed in the fun and made some great progress on implementing our theme. He’s spent this week working on the TV schedule grid. So far he hasn’t run away screaming. i’ll get him to write about that in a future post.

Once the post-vacation glow and feeling of calm and relaxation faded away (i.e. by 9:01am Monday), I was right back it. First task was to figure out why the Update Status module (which is now part of core) on my install wasn’t telling me anything about the contributed modules I had installed, like it’s supposed to. Well, turns out that if you are downloading this code via CVS, rather than a tarball - as we are - then, in order for update status to properly work you need the CVS Deploy module.

Who knew? Not me.

Anyhow, i deployed CVS Deploy and now Update Status works as planned. Using that, I went and upgraded a bunch of modules that had been updated whilst I was away. Most notably, the Views 2 module went from an alpha to a beta release, so I was anxious to see what was going on with that. In particular with the argument handling issue that I mentioned previously.

The Views 2 Alpha was completely devoid of the the Views 1 argument handling logic. So, to make it work, I jimmied and jiggered things around and did the following:

Set the view_php view attribute by hand via some code like the following

$view_name = 'tv_episode_airings_viewable';
$view = views_get_view($view_name);
$view->view_php = '‘;
$view->save();

Then, in order to have that code properly executed by Views, I added some old Views 1 code to views/includes/view.inc

// Execute the initial PHP code that a view can have.
if (!empty($this->view_php)) {
ob_start();
$result = eval($this->view_php);
if (is_array($result)) {
$this->args = $result;
}
ob_end_clean();
}

Bingo bango - that worked!

Now, in the Views 2 Beta they’ve added the ability to add some PHP code on a per-argument basis, which seems to be the way of the future (rather than one single block of code to handle all the arguments). However, currently, it provides functionality to set a default value for an argument or to validate an argument. I see no way yet to manipulate an incoming argument.

So, for now, we’re keeping things as is. Once Views 2 is officially released we’ll probably have to reengineer things a bit to handle arguments properly.

There’s one other big problem we’ve been wrestling with this week - memory, or lack thereof. Don’t recall if I’ve mentioned this before but during certain activities on the system PHP throws a fatal error, saying it has used up its alloted memory. It first showed up when I tried to run the nightly cron tasks, which mainly consists of importing the PBS TV Guide schedule data. Each night in the middle of this run that error is thrown. It also shows up when I try to use the Drupal 6 Theme Editor. Pete also ran into when trying to install the first version of our custom WGBH TV Schedules module.

At the moment we’re not really sure what’s up. In php.ini I’ve got memory_limit = 256M, which should be plenty of memory for what we’re doing. I’ve even boosted the allotted memory to 512M and we still hit the error. Stay tuned…

Last but definitely not least we’ve fully staffed up and now have an official project manager and designer for this whole project. Please join me in a around of applause for these new team members Louise and Tyler! Welcome to the party!