Here’s my approach, all stored in a module called “customers”

1. Alter “user-register-form” found at www.your-domain.com/user/register
2. Add custom submit handler to “user-register-form” form
3. Upload user image in custom submit handler

it really is that simple :)

Using hook_form_FORM_ID_alter() to alter “user-register-form” making sure I only hook into that form.

Inside this function which in my case is called “customers_form_user_register_form_alter” I add a few attributes to the form so that it can handle file uploads:

$form['#attributes'] = array(
  'enctype' => 'multipart/form-data',
  'autocomplete' => 'off'
);

then add custom submit handler like so:

$form['#submit'][] = 'customers_register_handler';

and then the field that holds the image file:

$form['picture_upload'] = array(
  '#type' => 'file',
  '#title' => t('Company Logo')
);

in my case I use the user profile picture to store a company logo, but it’s just the title of the field. And now to where the magic happens; the custom submit handler:

$validators = array(
  'file_validate_is_image' => array(),
);
$file = file_save_upload('picture_upload', $validators);

if ($file == false) {
  form_set_error('picture_upload', t('Failed to upload picture'));
  $picture = null;
} elseif ($file != null) {
  $picture = $file;
  // Set the user id
  $picture->uid = $user->uid;
}

user_save($user, array(
  'picture_upload' => $picture,
));

One of the things that took me a bit of time to grasp was the fact that files are not passed inside the $form_state array, instead you call file_save_upload() where the 1. parameter is the name of the file field. In my case the file field is called picture_upload, and as you can see I’m currently not passing any file validation. The next “if statement” just takes care that a file was uploaded and sets the owner to the newly created user.

The only thing left is to call user_save() and pass in the file that was uploaded.

I know several modules exist that handle this for you, but adding a module just for that is an overkill in my opinion, especially since all my other logic related to “customers” is stored inside my customers.module.

<%= select_tag “district”, options_for_select(Customer.all.collect { |k| ["#{k.district} #{k.store}", k.id] }.insert(0, ["", 0]), params[:number].to_i) %>

- it also handles setting the selected option if one is passed – in this case in the query string. I have been blogging about this previously but noticed that I had forgotten to show how to pass the chosen option if one exists.

To check you database collation in MySQL you can use the following SQL statement:

SHOW TABLE STATUS;

This will show you a lot of useful info about your database including collation. If you want to check it for a specific table use the following SQL statement:

SHOW TABLE STATUS WHERE NAME = 'The Name of Your Table';

This will show you the same info as above but only for a specific table. And if you want to change you collation to utf8 use the following SQL statement:

ALTER TABLE The Name of Your Table CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8;

Building a Drupal 7 theme from the grounds up isn’t difficult, all you have to do is follow these simple steps and then your ready to rock n roll.

1) create a folder for your theme in sites/all/themes/ in my case the theme will be called “badning”, so Ill create the folder sites/all/themes/badning

2) place a name-of-your-theme.info file in sites/all/themes/name-of-your-theme, in my case it will be badning.info

Add the following to your name-of-your-theme.info file:

  1 name = Badning theme
  2 description = Badning.dk responsive theme
  3 core = 7.x
  4 engine = phptemplate
  5 regions[header] = Header
  6 regions[content] = Content
  7 regions[footer] = Footer
  8 stylesheets[all][] = badning.css
  9 scripts[] = badning.js

I have only added the bare minimum of regions that I will use.  Now your ready to building your actual theme.

call_user_func_array('before_all', array($func, &$params));

as you can see, the $params is now a reference within an array and putting it into an array makes the whole difference. I found this solution over at stackoverflow.com - MAN I LOVE THAT SITE!

The user_func which in this case is called “before_all” looks like this:

function before_all($func, &$args)
{
}

In my PHP micro framework it takes the current function and the arguments passed to that function as it’s arguments, and the second argument is passed as a reference.

Imagine that you have several URL’s that could be handled by the same function:

$urls = array(
 'home' => '^/$',
 'blog_post' => 'blog/([0-9]{4})-([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{2})/([a-z-]+)/',
 'page' => array(
 'about-me',
 'my-work',
 'contact'
 )
 );

the ‘page’ function could be a function that load a static html page based on the argument it’s receiving. The stub code for that function could look something like:

function page($args)
 {
 # Load static file based on $args
 }

That would be a nice feature to have in a micro framework

One of the things I want to improve is how you handle your applications URL, I’ve been using Google’s webapp framework and I like the way you define your applications URLs:

$urls = array(
  'home' => '^/$',
  'blog_post' => 'blog/([0-9]{4})-([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{2})/([a-z-]+)/',
  'page' => 'about-me'
);

as you can see it’s a simple hash table where the key is the name of a function and the value is the URL triggering the function.

You can achieve this by using the hook_block_view_MODULE_DELTA_alter inside your template.php file where the MODULE is “blog” and DELTA is “recent”, so in my case where my theme is called “smackblue” the function name is “smackblue_block_view_blog_recent_alter”:

/**
 * hook_block_view_MODULE_DELTA_alter()
 */
function smackblue_block_view_blog_recent_alter (&$data, $block) {
    $content = $data['content'];

    if ($content['blog_list']) {
        $result = db_query('SELECT n.nid FROM {node} n WHERE n.type = :type ORDER BY created DESC LIMIT 1', array(':type' => 'blog'));
        $obj = $result->fetchObject();
        $node = node_load($obj->nid);
        $data['content'] = node_view($node, 'full');
    }
}

I’m not keen on using db_query inside my template.php file, but I did not find any other way to get the recent blog post, if you know how, let me know. Now the teaser blog is being themed the same way as every other blog post in my theme.

You can remove these css files from within your template.php file which is what I prefer.

Here I’m removing anything that is not related to my own theme specific CSS file by using drupal 7′s hook_css_alter function.

/**
 * implement hook_css_alter()
 */
function smackblue_css_alter (&$css) {
    foreach ($css as $mod => $val) {
        // Remove modules/*
        if (stripos($mod, 'modules') !== false) {
            unset($css[$mod]);
        }
    }
}

I think this is the cleanest way to override or remove system specific CSS in drupal 7.

I want to use polymorphic models for my current app in order to represent the different types of users that the app is handling.

The base model is just a user and inside this model all the log in logic is stored and everything that is shared between all my different user types.

Inspired by cancan I wanted something that would be easy to maintain and easy to setup, therefor I decided to build a simple authentication system which I can then use in my app like this:

Visitor.can?(:view, '/secret/stuff')

and here the Visitor inherits from the User like so Visitor < User and the user is representing the database table in this case.

Inside my Visitor all the permissions are stored in a hash like this:

@permissions  = {
      :view => ["^/$", "deals", "deal\/[0-9]+$"]
    }

as you can see each key is the action and the value is an array of regular expressions. And then in the rails console I tested this like so:

["^/$", "deals", "deal\/[0-9]+$"].collect { |r| "/super/secret".match(r).nil? }

where the path (just a string) being tested is “/super/secret” then the above line of code will return:

[true, true, true]

the path “/super/secret” is not in the array of regular expressions representing the resources a visitor can view. But if I change the path to “/deal/42″ the returned array from the one liner would look like:

[true, true, false]

where false actually tells me that the visitor can view any path looking like “/deal/42″