mvc's blog

The two most common powerful editors for Unix, emacs and vim, both include the ability to reference a list of PHP function names so that you can jump to their definition while editing. You'll have to build the file yourself first, though, using ctags. The best implementation I know of is Exuberant Ctags by Darren Hiebert, which is available in most Linux distributions. Normally this is called just by running ctags -R, but by default ctags assumes that all PHP code is in files with names ending in .php.

The US National Security Agency has recently released a list of the top 25 dangerous coding errors which lead to security vulnerabilities, which includes such items as improper input validation, improper encoding or escaping of output, and cross-site request forgery. While I'd highly recommend reading the list for anyone writing code that will be used on a website accessible by the public, nothing on it should come as a surprise to any experienced programmer working in this field.

Last night I attended a celebrity Montreal Drupal meetup, and got to meet chx, who among other things is the top contributor to Drupal core in D7. He and webchick, D7 co-maintainer, gave us an overview of what's in store in D7, which is currently planned for last quarter 2009 or first quarter 2010.

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I spent Friday and Saturday at DrupalCamp Montreal, which was a great event — we had over 60 participants and all the sessions were small, informal presentations in which everyone attending had a chance to share their thoughts and ask questions. There were several sponsors but particular thanks is due to Koumbit who did most of the organizing (and contributed the most cash); this event wouldn't have happened without them.

Notes from a talk on how to use i18n with Drupal 6 for people who have never done it before, presented at DrupalCamp Montreal in October 2008.

Start with this page from the handbook: Tutorial - Building a multi-language site. You have the choice of switching based on path prefix (with optional browser language detection when no prefix is specified) or domain name.

Other useful modules: