Cwgordon7's blog

Over the past few months, the GHOP program has made innumerable contributions to the Drupal community. Now that GHOP is ending, many of these students are choosing to remain long-term contributors. This is awesome: it's exactly what the program was meant to achieve, getting high school students involved in open source communities. And what better way to get involved in Drupal than to go to Drupalcon?

Deeply inspired by chx's chipin for Dmitri, I have posted here the chipins' of two students requesting financial assistance to get to Drupalcon. Please, please, please seriously consider contributing to this cause. We want new contributors in the Drupal community? Well, here they are: but they need your help to fully join the community.

Today, the initial version of Flexifilter for Drupal 6.x was released. "What is this flexifilter?" you might ask. And the answer: Flexifilter is an awesome new module that's going to totally revolutionize the way filters are done in Drupal. It's going to become (almost) as important as CCK and Views for a site builder. Flexifilter was initially created by Corsix as a part of GHOP 2007-08.

What it is

Flexifilter allows you to define custom filters entirely through the user interface. You name a filter, you can create it. A filter to append a "back to top" link if the text is longer than 1000 characters? No problem. A filter to change links in the form of [[link|title]] into links in the form of <a href="link">title<a>? Downright easy. And, if you ever want to change the format from [[link|title]] to {{link:title}}, there will be no delving into php code necessary: just change your settings on the admin page.

The Drupal simpletest module is awesome! I discovered it while I was looking for a new GHOP task, and I loved the idea of it immediately. So, I claimed the task, and I'm writing now to share what I learned with you.

What it is

The simpletest module extends the php simpletest framework. Basically, it allows users to run a series of automated tests on a Drupal install.

Why it's useful

Often, new code is entered into Drupal contributed modules, and even the Drupal core, without being thoroughly tested - or even tested at all, in some situations. With simpletest, tests become so easy (without having to manually try maybe hundreds of situations) that finding and fixing bugs becomes a breeze.

GHOP stands for Google Highly Open Participation contest. It has started in late November, and will be finished by February. Already, an amazing amount of work has been completed. This project is succeeding at harnessing the power of people under 18 at quickly understanding new, complex things (that take adults years to understand) in less than an hour.

I am not surprised by this. Children and teenagers are smarter than adults, as has been proven time and time again. Google Summer of Code, aimed at college-level students, has not produced nearly as many results as this contest has.