Ubercart

I can’t think of anything more interesting to blog about on this lazy Sunday afternoon, so let me talk about what projects I’ve been hacking away at recently.

With rapidity that surprised even me, I was accepted to be a maintainer of the markItUp! module for Drupal. This module adds the markItUp! editor to text areas, which adds a row of buttons for operations such as making text bold and such - but it’s not WYSIWYG; clicking a button just alters the text in whatever markup system you choose (Markdown, BBcode, etc) to have that property. It’s a nice middle ground; the ease of use of a WYSIWYG editor, but without the crappy code.

I ended up refactoring the entire module; there were some hoops to jump through before I got it usable. I initially wanted it to work on all text areas which allowed styled text, including those created by CCK and such, but due to the way markItUp! currently works, it’s not too happy about working with more than one textarea at a time, particularly if you want to be able to change the “sets” (buttons) it’s using depending on which input format is selected and such. But eventually I got to where I was happy with it and released it as a 2.0 dev release. I may have also screwed up the original 1.0 dev release while I was at it; the jury’s still out on that. Argh, I hate CVS.

I’m also still hacking away at Ubercart Auction in between waiting for folks to get back to me on other projects and such. I recently added an optional submodule which allows people to “Buy Now” auctioned products. Implementing this properly required reworking a lot of the guts of the original module, but it’s better than ever now. The client was originally hoping to go live with this site this month, but it’s looking like that might not happen; they haven’t got back to me on it. Oh well. I hope to shore up the Views support in the future.

Also, as you may have seen in the “ego menu” there on the right, I recently started a new site called Yen Plus Info. It’s intended to be a database of the people and comics featured in Yen Plus, a new monthly comics anthology which features Japanese, Korean and domestic comics - a nice blend of genres which offers something for everyone, really. I’ve never been much of a comics geek and never thought I’d start a site like this… it was an afternoon project which turned into a weekend project which turned into a “well, I’ve got this far; might as well finish it” project. I ended up getting it done all with contributed modules; not counting the template (which prominently features my spartan, text-heavy design style; IANAartist), I didn’t write any custom code to get this up and running.

I’m also moving forward on another clients’ site which I can’t quite reveal at this moment which makes heavy use of Domain Access. It’s going to be quite cool; so cool that I’m going to do a write-up of it and see if I can get it on the front page of Drupal.org. Domain Access is an amazing system; mad props to Ken Rickard for making this possible.

Finally, I’ve been considering finally getting back to work at the transition of SigFeeder to Drupal. I actually got pretty far on this over the summer, if I recall correctly, but then I just kinda stopped working on it for whatever reason and never got back to work on it.

I started a new project at Drupal.org today. It’s called Ubercart Auction, and, as you may have guessed, it’s a module which adds auction capabilities to the excellent Ubercart shopping cart system for Drupal. (At the time I posted this, the lovely D.o robots had yet to pack the code together into a downloadable dev release yet, but hopefully it’ll happen soon.) It was written for a client whose site isn’t live yet who is going to want to sell things via auction on their store. After seeing how well the module was progressing and how useful it could be for other people, I asked our contact there if they would be cool with us releasing it for free, and he gave us the okay.

Drupal’s other e-commerce solution, appropriately named Drupal e-Commerce, already has an auction solution. However, Ubercart seems to have more momentum nowadays. It’s a bit complicated to set up, and the D6 version isn’t up to snuff yet, but it’s quite the capable little bugger. Heck, anything’s better than the horrid tangle of code that is osCommerce (or, as a friend and I dubbed it last night, posCommerce).

I also started work last night (on my own time) on a little module which would provide a block telling site visitors how many form submissions the lovely anti-spam service Mollom has blocked on your site. I was hoping to have it done tonight, but Mollom’s servers seem to always report that it’s blocked zero submissions, which can’t be right. If I can get these issues resolved soon, I’ll probably create a project for it over the weekend.