tips

We all have come to love and admire jQuery for the amazing Javascript library it is. But we also have fallen in love with numerous extensions to jQuery; plugins, modules - whatever you call 'em. Most of us, however, just use these goodies and bless the hearts of all wonderful people who make the gems available. Some of us are even a little bit intimidated when we look at all the complicated Javascript-ing going on in the source files... Especially when/if we accidentally look into a minified version ;)

Jokes aside, starting a new jQuery plugin is quite simple. Here is just how easy one could be:

(function($) { 

	// jQuery plugin initialization
	$.fn.irakli = function(conf) {   
		alert("okaaaay");		
	}; 
	
})(jQuery);

This goofy plugin will allow you to invoke irakli() function on a jQuery object. For instance, $('div.something').irakli() will have an alert box pop up.

It is only available in the top-level theme as a variable, but in case you need to derive the same value from the View object, per se, here it is:

$view->display[$view->current_display]->handler->get_path();

If you are working on a system with somewhat large number of tables, you probably have wanted to delete a number of tables matching a pattern (dropping all tables is a specific case of this one). You can do that, by creating a very simple stored procedure:

mysql> delimiter $$
create procedure drop_tables_like(pattern varchar(255))
begin

SELECT 
@drop_sql:=concat('DROP TABLE IF EXISTS ', group_concat(table_name)) 
drop_statement
FROM information_schema.tables
WHERE table_schema=database() and table_name like pattern;

IF (@drop_sql IS NOT NULL) THEN
  PREPARE stmt from @drop_sql;
  EXECUTE stmt;
  DROP PREPARE stmt;
END IF;

end$$
delimiter ;

then you can use this procedure to mass-delete tables like:

mysql> call drop_tables_like ('ika%');

I finally got around developing a little, nifty Drupal module I've been craving for, for a really long while now. The "Edit Block" module adds inline block editing capability to any theme. It's entirely jQuery-based, hence - no dirty intrusive theming hacks are necessary and is compatible with most properly built Drupal themes.

Some nice themes do provide similar capabilities, but most - do not and adding it is no fun, so now there's a module that does it all for you.

Enjoy

How to install GIT on OS-X in under 5 minutes:

curl http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.3.3.tar.gz -O
tar xzvf git-1.6.3.3.tar.gz 
cd git-1.6.3.3
make configure 
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
NO_MSGFMT=yes make prefix=/usr/local all
sudo make install

Git should be installed on your OS-X now, which you can verify by issuing: git --version command in Terminal. However, it's a good idea to also pre-configure the default username and e-mail for your Git installation:

git config --global user.name "Your Firstname Lastname" 
git config --global user.email "username@example.com"
git config --global --list

I personally, also like to set:

git config --global color.ui "auto"