drupal

I have used the free Mollom plan to protect the forms on this site with CAPTCHA or text analysis. For the past few months, it has been working very poorly to be honest. Comment posts that were very obviously spam were getting though consistently and I have been removing 20-30 spam posts en masse about once a week.

I submitted a ticket when I first noticed this happening with Mollom support and got a quick reply, but after my initial replies the request was waiting a follow-up from them for quite some time (and twice, at that).

Today I got news that it was a service-wide issue and it has been resolved. Hopefully you will notice a significant reduction in spam posts! Honestly I am not very happy with Mollom at the moment and may look to other alternatives if this doesn't pan out, but then again it's a free service and it worked wonderfully in the past so I can't complain. You get what you pay for.

The issue was more that I was looking at taking 5-10 clients to their basic paid plan, but after my experience with their customer service I am hesitant to do so. As always, I guess time will tell.

I have been reading a lot of buzz around Twitter's Bootstrap responsive theme and although I am a huge fan of the Omega theme, I think bootstrap has a lot of potential and wanted to experiment with it.

My blog is long overdue for a facelift, so I now present to you my Bootstrap-ized blog! At the moment it is simply using the base theme, but I will be implementing a customized sub-theme shortly. I am interested to hear what you think (and if it does or doesn't work on mobile devices) in the comments!

Update 2013-02-08: I have performed minimal customization to the theme and after working with it for a bit I can start to see Bootstrap's strengths and weaknesses. Although Omega is very flexible and has a bunch of responsive options, I feel like they could use a little more polish; Bootstrap's responsive design implementation feels so quick and smooth and it also scales well at all viewport sizes. I also like Bootstrap's barebone styles (font, text layout, etc) much better than Omega's defaults which I believe use serif fonts (*ugh*). That said, such a thing is very easy to change in CSS and so it's not a huge disadvantage for Omega.

Where Omega also beats Bootstrap (and by a large margin) is when it comes to theme customizability. The Bootstrap theme settings page offers few options and in several instances I found that several common Drupal-specific CSS rules (such .indent) were missing entirely. Omega has been around for quite some time and as a result has excellent integration and provides a plethora options to modify the zone, region and block grid right the theme's settings page.

If I had to do it over I would stick to Omega, but Bootstrap will be giving it a run for its money once it picks up on some of the grid customization tricks Omega has.

** Vote for us here! **

At my work we have been developing a new website called the Green Energy Management System (GEMS) that targets small businesses and helps them perform quick and cost-effective self-energy audits. With the results, they are able to determine their estimated cost savings as well as view recommended energy conservation measures (ECMs) to help lessen their environmental impact.

We have submitted the project in the Apps for Energy contest and could receive additional funding for development if we place! If you have a minute please vote for us, it would be very much appreciated!

After giving it some thought, I think I am going to try and integrate my Tweets (@stewartadam) with the blog posts here since my blog posts tend to be lengthy or technical posts one in a while with nothing in between. I tweet about once a day or so, so even if it's not much at least there will be some new content consistently when you check back to the homepage! Thoughts? Module suggestions? I know that this is easily possible with Drupal, but I haven't begun looking into competing modules yet. If you've done something similar I'd love to hear about the module you used and what you think about it overall.

I have been using uc_cano on a few Ubercart sites and found that it is a great module for restricting attributes combinations when one attribute only makes sense if a certain option is selected on another attribute. Unfortunately, the module is very minimally maintained and there are many bugs present in the most recent release. Several community patches have shown up to fix some of the issues, but they need to be mixed and matched to get a working module. Furthermore, out of the box uc_cano is not compatible with the uc_node_checkout nor uc_aac modules.

In order to future centralize development efforts, facilitate releases and maintain a more up-to-date code base, I have collected the various community contributions plus written several fixes of my own and forked uc_cano as uc_conditional_attributes, now available on Drupal.org at http://drupal.org/project/uc_conditional_attributes. I hope you enjoy the new module! A dev release is available and I am hoping to add the first stable release soon after two known bugs are taken care of.

Some the changes I have made to cano include:

• Rewrite of the JavaScript code and the addition of hooks
• Addition of a new hooks & preliminary API for other modules to use
• Compatibility with uc_aac (patch also required to uc_aac until it gets accepted upstream)
• Compatibility with uc_node_checkout