Raised Eyebrow Blog

DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 is just around the corner and Raised Eyebrow hopes to “own the podium”, sorry I couldn’t resist. Chris and I have been to 2 Drupalcon’s so far in our Drupal lifetime, and have decided it is time to give something back. We’ve come up with 2 Session Proposals that are overviews about how we used Drupal to create two killer applications for managing a small Web Business.

One stores all kinds of client information; FTP connection info., Drupal logins, client contact info., newsletter provider and vendor info. The other is an online training manual for our clients, enabling us to train them remotely, give them access to it wherever they can find a browser and reduces the need to print large binders that end up getting lost or in the landfill/recycling.

So if you’re interested in hearing more about these the please go cast your vote by following the links below:

Manage your Web Studio using Drupal
Using Drupal to train clients on how to use Drupal

The closing date for voting for Voting is March 1st, so get voting. See you in San Fran.

There are many ways to skin the cat when it comes to putting video on a Drupal site. I’ve tried and tested quite a few methods since my first introduction to Drupal 2 years ago. I’ve used Embedded Media Field as well as Video Filter but finally settled on the combination of FileField with JWPlayer or Flowplayer and in some cases the Media Mover Module for moving files to Amazon S3 storage. I’m going to use our recent launch of the CCPA website as a case study for how we currently handle video delivery. So let’s dissect this a little.

Uploading files

The video files need to be uploaded before we display them. This is best achieved using the wonderful Filefield Module. This is quite a simple yet powerful module developed/maintained by Lullabot, Nate Haug (quicksketch), whom I’ve had the pleasure of being trained by at one of their excellent Drupal Theming workshops. Once you install and enable the module you then add a new CCK field, of type “filefield”. In our case we have a content type called “Multimedia”. We add the field to this content type. You then need to configure the following:

1. Permitted upload file extensions

In most cases this is relatively straightforward, it’s just one file type. If you’re using JWPlayer or Flowplayer it will be FLV. Both these players are built to play Flash Video files (FLV). If you have Quicktime MOV’s or AVI’s that you want to upload then you’ll need to consider different options for playing video. For the purpose of this case study we’re just uploading FLV files.

2. File size restrictions

It’s very important that you set these, otherwise you may end up with users trying to upload 200MB videos, not a very good idea. I set this low as a learning feature for clients. Any reasonably long FLV file that is over 40MB is probably not optimized as well as it should be.

3. Path Settings

I like to keep all files that admin/editor users upload in a folder called uploads so that it’s easy to manage them later if they need to be exported etc.

Multimedia File Field Settings

Create a placeholder image

Most video players require some sort of poster/placeholder image to display before the video plays. In this case I created another FileField for the placeholder image. We’ll use that later on in conjunction with the ImageCache module to achieve our desired results.

Moving Files to Amazon S3

We’ve been using Amazon S3 for storing video files on quite a number of sites recently. One reason is that we were looking for a location off the webserver that could deliver the video, without impacting the performance of the server, so that in the event of a traffic spike the webserver wouldn’t fall over. We could also have used Amazon EC2 or another CDN service for this, however as most of our clients have a very regional (BC) audience. Most CDN’s have nodes in various locations across the US and Europe and this would have served no real improvement as the nearest cached version will always be in the same place for everyone.

So if they’re uploading the files directly to the Drupal site, how to the files get delivered from Amazon S3. That’s where the Media Mover module comes in. This module has many purposes, but for our needs it simply harvests all the files uploaded via the “Multimedia” content type and moves those files to Amazon S3 so that we can deliver them from there.

Download, install and enable the Media Mover module. You’ll also need an S3 account and will need to set that up via the module setting page. You then need to add a Configuration via https://www.yoursite.ca/admin/build/media_mover/add.

Media Mover has 4 actions which it performs on your files:

• Harvest – Define/collect the files you want to perform actions on
• Process – Perform certain actions on the files
• Storage – Where to store files once the actions have been carried out
• Complete – Final actions to perform on the files

So in this case we just want to harvest all Multimedia files and store them on Amazon S3.

So for clarification here Media Mover does NOT MOVE the files to Amazon S3, it simply COPIES them over to S3 and the original files remain on your server.

Media Mover Settings

Delivering the moved Video files

So this is where the Drupal theming trickery comes in. Flowplayer and JWPlayer are both Flash based FLV video players than can be called using Javascript and that’s exactly what I do on this site. In plain english this is what happens:

1. Output the placeholder image to screen as a link.
2. Use Javascript so that when the user clicks on the image the video plays.
3. Deliver the video from the file on Amazon S3 rather than the file on the webserver (Drupal site).

We need to modify three files to achive the above:

• template.php
• multimedia.js (a newly created JS file)
• node-multimedia.tpl.php (a custom template file for all multimedia types)

template.php file

Setting up all the variables we’re going to need to use as well as making the javascript available

if($variables['field_file'][0]['view']) { //If there is a file and there is something to display...
  if ($variables['field_aspect_ratio'][0]['value']) { //Aspect ratio handling
    $variables['aspect_ratio'] = $variables['field_aspect_ratio'][0]['value'];
  } else {
  $variables['aspect_ratio'] = 'normal';
  }
  $variables['multimedia_type'] = 'video'; //Set the type of multimedia - we also have audio and interactive...
  custom_theme_get_media_mover_files($variables['field_file'][0], $variables['media_mover'][3]); //Set the filepath to the media moved filepath...
  drupal_add_js(array('videoplayerpath' => path_to_theme() .'/scripts/plugins/flowplayer/flowplayer-3.1.1.swf'), 'setting'); //Set a JS variable to retrieve later...
  drupal_add_js(path_to_theme() .'/scripts/plugins/flowplayer/example/flowplayer-3.1.1.min.js', 'theme'); //Call the player...
  drupal_add_js(path_to_theme() .'/scripts/multimedia.js', 'theme');//Call the custom JQuery to handle creating the player...
}
 
/**
 * A function that takes a file object and a media_mover element array and set the file path to
 * its media moved path on Amazon S3 or wherever it moved to.
 *
 * It uses the unique file_id identifier to match file with media_mover file.
 *
 * $file = $variables['file_image'][0];
 * $media_mover = $variables['media_mover'][{id of media mover configuration}];
 *
 * @param 		&$file A Drupal file array (by reference)
 * @param 		$media_mover A media_mover file/element array
 */
function custom_theme_get_media_mover_files(&$file, $media_mover) {
  if(module_exists('media_mover_api') && $media_mover) { // If media mover is installed...
    foreach($media_mover as $media) { // Loop through each media_moved file...
      if($media['fid'] == $file['fid']) { // If they match (file id is a unique identifier...
        $file['filepath'] = $media['complete_file']; // Replace the attached file path with the media moved file path...
      }
    }
  }
} // custom_theme_get_media_mover_files()

Let me explain one thing in regards to line 9. I’ve created a custom function and I’m passing

$variables['media_mover'][3]

to my custom function. When you create a Media Mover configuration and map it to a CCK field, it creates an array in $variables to keep track of the Media Mover object. The array is called ‘media_mover’ and the number 3 in this case is the ID of the Media Mover configuration.

node-multimedia.tpl.php

Set up the template. Create a wrapper div with the placeholder image as the background image (this is run through imagecache) and display the play button as a link with the path set to the path of the Amazon S3 file. This link will also have an id attribute of ‘multimedia’. This is necessary as it allows us to attach the player, via Javascript, to this link.

<div id="containing-block">
<div id="video-wrapper" class="<?php print $aspect_ratio;?>">
<div>
     &lt; ?php print l('<img src="/'.path_to_theme().'/images/ccpa-button-play-large.png" alt="Play this video" />', $field_file[0]['filepath'], $options = array('html' => TRUE, 'attributes' => array('id' => 'multimedia', 'class' => $multimedia_type))); ?></div>
</div>
</div>

multimedia.js file

Hook the Flowplayer to the link, with id of ‘multimedia’, that we created in the template.

Drupal.behaviors.showMultimedia = function(context) {
  var interactive_path = $('#multimedia').attr('href'); /*Get the path to the video*/
  var interactive_image = $('#multimedia').css('background-image');	/*Get the path to the placeholder image*/
  interactive_image = interactive_image.slice(4,interactive_image.length-1);/*Tidying up the interactive image path*/
 
  if($('#multimedia').hasClass('video')) {/*If the link has a class of video*/
  $('#multimedia').flowplayer( /*Initialize the flowplayer and configure the controls*/
    Drupal.settings.basePath + Drupal.settings.videoplayerpath, /*Path to the player, gotten from temaplate.php*/
    {
      plugins: {
	controls: {
	  stop: true,
	  backgroundColor: '#efefef',
	  backgroundGradient: 'none',
	  borderRadius: '0px',
	  bufferColor: '#d2d6ab',
	  bufferGradient: 'none',
	  buttonColor: '#777777',
	  buttonOverColor: '#99a134',
	  durationColor: '#cccccc',
	  height: 25,
	  opacity: 1.0,
	  progressColor: '#99a134',
	  sliderColor: '#9999999',
	  sliderGradient: 'none',
	  timeBgColor: '#777777',
	  timeColor: '#ffffff',
	  tooltipColor: '#000000',
	  tooltipTextColor: '#ffffff',
	  volumeSliderColor: '#777777',
	  volumeSliderGradient: 'none'
	}
      }
    });
  }
};

I hope that was easy to follow. Now there’s one more thing to cover and that’s Aspect Ratio.

Aspect Ratio

The issue of aspect ratio is very important when figuring out how to display video. Not so recently YouTube switched all video display to the 16:9 ratio thus setting the stage for the proliferation of the widescreen aspect ratio across the web. So how do you allow the user to upload a video and choose it’s aspect ratio. I’m sure there are other ways to do this via Metadata etc, but for our needs on this site I used a CCK field. This is a simple CCK field set with three options:

1. None (defaults to 4:3)
2. Normal (4:3)
3. Widescreen (16:9)

Aspect Ratio Field Settings

We then check the value of this field in template.php above:

if ($variables['field_aspect_ratio'][0]['value']) { //Aspect ratio handling
    $variables['aspect_ratio'] = $variables['field_aspect_ratio'][0]['value'];
  } else {
  $variables['aspect_ratio'] = 'normal';
  }

and set a variable called ‘aspect_ratio” which we apply as a class to the div wrapping the video in the node-multimedia.tpl.php:

<div id="containing-block">
<div id="video-wrapper" class="<?php print $aspect_ratio;?>">
<div>
     < ?php print l('<img src="/'.path_to_theme().'/images/ccpa-button-play-large.png" alt="Play this video" />', $field_file[0]['filepath'], $options = array('html' => TRUE, 'attributes' => array('id' => 'multimedia', 'class' => $multimedia_type))); ?></div>
</div>
</div>

We have also created image cache presets for the placeholder images to account for both aspect ratios. These are named ‘multimedia_normal’ and ‘multimedia_widescreen’ and these have the appropriate dimensions associated with them:

Image Cache Presets

So using the amazing article on A List Apart for creating intrinsic ratios for video we use CSS to resize the player based on the aspect ratio chosen by the user.

style.css file

/* -- Multimedia -- */
#containing-block {
  width: 100%;
}
 
#video-wrapper {
  position: relative;
  padding-top: 25px;
  height: 0;
}
 
  #video-wrapper div,
  #video-wrapper embed,
  #video-wrapper object {
    position: absolute;
    top: 0;
    left: 0;
    width: 100%;
    height: 100%;
  }
 
  #video-wrapper.normal {
    padding-bottom: 75%;
  }
 
  #video-wrapper.widescreen {
    padding-bottom: 56.25%;
  }
 
  * html #video-wrapper {
    margin-bottom: 45px;
    margin-bot\tom: 0;
  }
 
#video-wrapper #multimedia.audio {
  display:block;
  height:100%;
  margin:1em 0 0 0;
  text-align: center;
  width:100%;
}
 
#video-wrapper #multimedia {
  display:block;
}
 
  #video-wrapper.normal #multimedia img {
    /*margin:118.5px 0 0;*/
    margin:32% 42%;
  }
 
  #video-wrapper.widescreen #multimedia img {
    margin:22% 41%;
  }

And the end result looks something like this http://www.policyalternatives.ca/multimedia/matthew-poverty-and-looking-after-each-other-tough-times. They haven’t added any widescreen content yet, just testing content.

So what are the advantages of doing things this way?

1. You can easily use any player to play your flash files (all you need to do  is change the path to your player and a few configuration params in multimedia.js)
2. All your video content is hosted on and delivered from Amazon S3. But there is also a copy on your local server in the event of something going wrong on Amazon S3
3. You don’t have to worry about your video looking skewed due to aspect ratio problems
4. You can add many other apsect ratios pretty quickly
5. The video file is still downloadable when javascript is not present or disabled

I’d love to get feedback on how other do this, please leave a comment or send me an email and let me know how you deliver Video content on your site.

If you use Ubercart on your Drupal website you may be familiar with product classes. Ubercart has, by default, a product content type, however say you have other content types on your site that you want to sell, you can create product classes from those – http://www.ubercart.org/docs/user/3341/understanding_product_classes.

This works nicely until that moment when you want to rename your content type machine name.. e.g from “contenttype” to “content_type”

I did that recently thinking everything would be hunky dory once I made the change, the results were not so nice. So to help prevent this from happening to anyone else, here’s a simple rule to follow before making changes to your content type machine name.

Make sure you remove your content type as a product class before changing it’s machine name.

It’s that easy, simply disassociate your content type from Ubercart. The page to do this can be a little scary (www.yoursite.com/admin/store/products/classes), but just click the delete link on the class you want to disassociate and you’ll get a “Are you sure you want to do this message”, go ahead, it won’t delete your nodes, it just removes a flag that tells Ubercart they’re products. Also, if you’re worried about losing your product data, like SKU, Price, Shipping info etc, in my case it retained all product info when I re-instated it. Please backup your data before doing this, I cannot be responsible for any problems this causes on your site. Now, go to your content type, change the machine name.

Oh, and don’t forget to double check all your views are still working, you may need to edit them to ensure they’ve picked up the new content type machine name. I guess this is a good lesson to remind you to give your content types a machine name that you will not want change later.

I’d been a little skeptical about the idea that anyone can contribute to the Open Source community by giving a little help now and again. This skepticism came from the flaming given for asking ‘newbie’ questions, asking a question in the wrong room or from suffering the raging ego of a well seasoned and highly adored contributor. Today however, I feel much more positive about my ability to give back to Drupal and the Open Source community, and it all came from a simple (or maybe not so simple) thank you. Here’s the story:

Yesterday afternoon, while tearing my hair out over some tricky views problem that I could not find a solution to, I logged in to IRC, which I don’t usually do, to see if I could get some help.

In the #drupal room I asked my question and as usual didn’t receive any replies (which is why I don’t usually log in). It’s a bit of a difficult VIEWS problem and those usually don’t get answered quickly in IRC. While waiting for a response I noticed a question that was similar to mine but not as complex. I took some time (2 minutes) to review the code and I was able to speculate on what the problem was. I posted a proposed solution and it worked. I didn’t really think much of it until later on when I received an email via drupal.org from the person I helped asking me for my e-mail address. I sent it on and this morning I awoke to the email below. Until now I had been wary of devoting my time to hanging around in the IRC channels. This experience has changed my feelings on this quite a bit and I hope to spend a little more of my time in there, when I have it, helping others. In this case, it definitely did pay to help others, but the thank you email was more than enough, it made my day, my week, my month and maybe even my year :) Here’s to contributing more to the community. It doesn’t take much, and just a simple thank you for the help, when given, makes all the difference.

Hi Colin,

Thanks. I am in Fort Smith, NT just on the Alberta/NWT border directly north of Edmonton.
I am a Fire Scientist, I model Wildfire on the landscape. Yesterday I was completing the Drupal Integration part of a multi-year government project, most of us running on little or no sleep and less patience. I CVS updated VIEWS and it became way more strict about the PHP code and broke my drupal. I had been begging for assistance in different irc drupal chats for about 45 mintues when you came along. It really was like saving our team, when the view worked, the entire fire science team cheered. We just wanted to say a real heartfelt thanks.
I am sending you, $20 via email, its a small gesture, as our team knows that $20 will buy a friday case of beer anywhere in canada except north of Norman Wells NWT ;-) Perhaps you can claim to be the first in your office to have been mailed a case of beer by the drupal community – LOL

I’ve been working with Coda now for a few weeks and it’s been going pretty smoothly. There are a few bugs in the software, or they may even be feature requests :) When creating a file locally and subsequently uploading it to the server the file permissions are set to 700. This was causing all sorts of weirdness on a Drupal site that I’m currently theming. This is definitely a bug, however it’s pretty easy to overcome. In “Preferences -> Transfers” there is an option to “Set permissions on upload”. Set this to 644. This is the recommended permission for files in your theme folder in Drupal. You should now have no more problems when uploading files. If you’ve already uploaded files, it’s pretty easy to change via the command line using the chmod command:

chmod 644 filename.php

I’m working on a site right now that has a Publications content type, which in turn has a multiple value CCK text field for Author. If more than one author was input I needed them to display as a comma separated list in a view. How do you go about modifying this? My first stop was the theming info link in Views, and that helped me narrow it down to a template file to use, views-view-field.tpl.php(). But that file didn’t allow me to modify the individual fields without getting a whole load of other HTML in the bargain.

< ?php
// $Id: views-view-field.tpl.php,v 1.1 2008/05/16 22:22:32 merlinofchaos Exp $
 /**
  * This template is used to print a single field in a view. It is not
  * actually used in default Views, as this is registered as a theme
  * function which has better performance. For single overrides, the
  * template is perfectly okay.
  *
  * Variables available:
  * - $view: The view object
  * - $field: The field handler object that can process the input
  * - $row: The raw SQL result that can be used
  * - $output: The processed output that will normally be used.
  *
  * When fetching output from the $row, this construct should be used:
  * $data = $row->{$field->field_alias}
  *
  * The above will guarantee that you'll always get the correct data,
  * regardless of any changes in the aliasing that might happen if
  * the view is modified.
  */
?>
< ?php print $output; ?>

Using the brilliant “Theme developer” extension of the Devel module I was able to pin point the theme function – theme_content_view_multiple_field that would allow me to modify the actual value of the field without the wrapper div’s etc (I’m not getting into the views divitis argument.

Here’s a quick snippet of code to place in your template.php file of your theme to allow you to modify multiple value fields:

function custom_theme_content_view_multiple_field($items, $field, $values) {
  $output = '';
  switch($field['field_name']) {
    // If this is the author field then we need to comma separate the authors
    case 'field_author':
      $output .= '<div class="field-item">'. implode(', ', $items) .'</div>';
      break;
 
    default:
      foreach ($items as $item) {
        if (!empty($item) || $item == '0') {
	  $output .= '<div class="field-item">'. $item .'</div>';
	}
      }
      break;
  }
  return $output;
}

I used a switch statement because I have a lot of other multiple fields that need to be themed in different ways and it’s nicer than a whole load of if statements. Also switch provides a default state if a condition isn’t met.

I came across a problem with the Webform module recently that seemed initially puzzling but on closer examination was actually quite simple.

The Problem

When viewing the webform results in the analysis page it appeared that there were duplicate values for some fields:

The Cause

TinyMCE. It seems that the webform and it’s components may have been created when TinyMCE was disabled and then edited at a later date when it was enabled. The visibility settings for TinyMCE were as follows:

node/*
user/*
comment/*
admin/build/block/*

This meant that TinyMCE was being attached to textareas in the webform component editing pages, usually at ‘node/xx/edit/components/x’.

“select” form components in webforms use a textarea to allow you to input the options for the select field. Each option value is input on a new line in the textarea. With TinyMCE enabled the options had a <br /> tag appended to them. Whenever the site editor edited the form component values, and had TinyMCE enabled, the value of the option changed from “College” to “College<br />”. So any further submissions to the form resulted in the submitted data being recorded as “College<br />”

When running analysis on this data, the results showed up as duplicates

College 34
College 215

due to the <br /> being rendered out in the HTML, it really should have read

College<br /> 34
College 215

The Solution

Turn off TinyMCE for all webform component editing pages. I did this via the Visibility setting in TinyMCE module:

node/add/*
node/*/edit
user/*
comment/*
admin/build/block/*

Now it only shows up on editing nodes and add nodes, not editing form components.

Now for the data. The first thing to do was to sort out the webform component. I tried to run a find and replace on the database in the ‘webform_components’ table, but this didn’t work, so I resorted to editing and re-saving each form component individually. Then I moved to cleaning up the submitted data. I ran a simple find and replace query on this to remove the unwanted <br /> tags:

UPDATE `webform_submitted_data` set `data` = replace(`data`,'<br />','') WHERE `nid` = NODE_ID_HERE;

This says; Update my webform_submitted_data table by replacing all instances of <br /> in the data table, with nothing, and do this for all data submitted for the webform whose nid(Node ID) is the id of the webform with the funky data.

This worked a treat and the values reset themselves nicely:

I’d been itching to try out Coda as my development tool, and their recent 3 day sale meant I got a copy for $45. It’s pretty good so far, I have a couple of issues with it that I’ll cover in a later post. One really nice thing about it is the Books feature. This allows you to add reference material to your Coda development environment and search it without having to go to a browser. I’m always needing the Drupal API, well I actually use this one http://drupalcontrib.org/, which is a brilliant Core and Contrib API, perfect for those tricky Views or Webform moments. Setting up a book is really easy, and here is a screen shot of the settings for a book for Drupal 5 and Drupal 6.

Drupal 5 Book settings

Drupal 6 Book Settings

I also created a nice little Drupal Book icon from the PSD that I found here which was linked to from here (tips on how to insert coda books).

Drupal Coda Book Icon

Direct link to book icon

We have some folks with allergies in the office and that makes it difficult for us to splurge on desserts that contain:

• Flour
• Sugar
• Eggs
• Dairy

I am a big fan of raw food and was met with surprise when I mentioned to my colleagues that I made a raw chocolate cake, from Avocado, that was almost too good for words. So to mute their surprise I made one and brought it in for them to try.

The mention of an Avocado chocolate cake usually results in people making a face that suggests they’re thinking of a big green cake with chocolate chips or something altogether more monstrous and horrible tasting. Well they couldn’t be more wrong, this thing tastes divine and looks even better. I found the recipe in a book called Raw Food Made Easy for 1 or 2 People by Jennifer Cornbleet (Google Books, Amazon).

It involves using two separate recipes:

• One for Coconut Crust (Page 145)
• The other for Chocolate Mousse 9 (Page 160)

Note that I used Agave Nectar rather than Maple Syrup, I love the sweetness of Agave Nectar and was able to find organic nectar easier than organic maple syrup.

I think everyone here in the office was pleasantly surprised as to how tasty it was and I’ll definitely be making another one soon. And when I say tasty I mean real tasty; this is one rich tasting, dairy free, raw chocolate cake.

Discovered a very upsetting scenario today while building out a Drupal 6 site. If you have the Update module enabled and drupal.org goes down your module admin page at www.example.com/admin/build/modules stops responding. Why? I think it’s because somewhere in the Update module is a call to updates.drupal.org.

The quick and dirty solution is to temporarily disable the module via the system table in your database.

How do I do that?

• Using phpMyAdmin or some other GUI tool or via the command link
1. View the system table contents
2. Find the row where filename is modules/update/update.module
3. Edit the row and set it’s status field to 0
4. Refresh your modules page
• Via SQL Query/command line

  UPDATE `system` SET `status` = 0 WHERE `filename` = 'modules/update/update.module'

I’m going to submit an issue about this and look into a possible solution. I was halted in my work for over an hour today because of this.
Disclaimer: I am not responsible for those of you who do not backup before making any changes to your database.