Drupal
Drupal is a robust, open source, PHP-based content management system. I’ve been involved in serving and implementing projects based on Drupal for several years now. Here are some things that I’ve given back to the Drupal community.
asset.module
I originally wrote the asset module, which is essentially database-backed file uploads with graphical thumbnail previews, while at EchoDitto (see the initial version here) but added some basic extensions to it to provide XML-RPC capabilities. This was mostly done as a demo of XML-RPC for the Washington, DC Drupalers meeting in April 2007. See the original blog post and grab the code, including a hastily-made demo Cocoa application, here.
http_redirect.module
I made some enhancements to the already-available http_redirect module for aliasing paths in a Drupal site to external URLs. These include Drupal 5.x support, an enhanced user interface, sending the proper referrer to the target URL, and proper 404 Not Found handling, among other things. Grab the code here for now until my changes make it into Drupal CVS. See the original blog post here.
boost.module
Boost is a module that performs plain HTML caching of a Drupal site, avoiding the need for Drupal, PHP, or MySQL and enabling much higher traffic throughput. I wrote a somewhat technical overview of Boost and will soon be releasing my additions to it. Also, the original author, Arto Bendiken, has made me a co-maintainer of the project.
Old Stuff
Other Drupal code that I’ve contributed remains, or will be released, over at EchoDitto’s open source site, where I originally released it. As of this writing this includes echo_bat, a thermometer-like goal progress indicator which uses the GD Graphics Library to dynamically create the images.
Also, in the trivia department, it turns out that I had some code in Drupal before I even knew what it was. Back in 2001 or so, I had contributed a patch for HTTPS support to Edd Dumbill’s XML-RPC library, which eventually became part of Drupal. Though that library is no longer part of Drupal, the first time I sat down to use Drupal, in 2004, I was surprised to find my name listed in the source code. You can see evidence of this today in this old patch.
