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MIDI links playing in the browser

Posted Thu, 06/11/2009 - 12:40 by Steve

Getting MIDI links at Composers' Village to play in people's browsers has been an interesting challenge. After I first noticed that the links were prompting file downloads, investigation led me to the "Content-Disposition" header that FileField puts on files downloaded from a filefield. (FileField is the name of the Drupal module that I am using to implement the file links for the Village, and the particular container is a filefield.)

Drupal, Eclipse, and PDT development workflow -- the big picture

Posted Thu, 05/21/2009 - 09:13 by Steve

Setting up my Drupal development environment based on Eclipse with PDT and the Zend debugger took me a huge amount of time. Searching on drupal.org yields a lot of configuration details for Eclipse, and Web-wide searches yield detailed setup instructions for various combinations of software versions and operating systems. But what finally helped me over my last, and most time-consuming, challenges was the workflow discussion at http://groups.drupal.org/node/2663.

Hiding the clutter on "Create content" and other forms

Posted Wed, 05/20/2009 - 12:00 by Steve

One of the first things that struck me about the Drupal 6 out-of-the-box experience is that there are an overwhelming number of choices when one clicks Create content and creates ones's first Story and Page nodes. The first user account is privileged and hence you see many options a typical user would not when you are using the first account.

Programmatically Creating Instances of CCK Types - Drupal 6

Posted Sat, 05/09/2009 - 17:13 by Steve

During the design phase of Composers' Village I devised a database schema for the musical data consisting of three CCK types: Villager, Tune, and Project. The reason for the Villager type was to contain a user's musical information, e.g., what Tunes they had contributed in a way that could persist after that user's account had been deleted. I basically wanted the database to stay consistent and well-linked even after a contributing user left and their account was deleted.

The difficulty of this design was that in early implementations the first thing a user had to do after setting up their account information was go to Create content and make a VIllager to represent themselves musically. It would hold a text blurb which was their musical bio but was mostly an empty container for information about any future musical contributions to Composers' Village. This was a usability problem because it was a real nuisance to have to go through this extra step when joining Composers' Village.

So I realized that the Villager for a user had to be created automatically for them when the account was made. In the Getting started page I could explain how to fill out the musical bio after creating account but having to teach the new user how to create an instance of Villager, as well, was definitely too much.

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