When the web first started everything was in Times New Roman, black on grey with few images.

Things have moved on a long way since then, but there are still very few fonts. I’ve worked on many sites that have tried to overcome this by various routes.

I’ve been working on a Drupal project to build a CMS for the production and management of very specific content.

The emphasis is all on the backend system, with tight field size limits (character count including markup) and restricted input (specified tags only).

Because of this I needed to use TinyMCE fully - restricting the valid_elements set, and adding event handlers for paste, and keyup.

I’m working on an AJAX heavy site for a defined audience who all have JavaScript - so I have a form with no submit button that gets submitted by an change handler.

A few days into learning Symfony and so far I’m keen on

• configuration check to start with
• good MVC separation
• ability to generate initial MVC components from a database definition
• form validation to match database constraints
• wrapping various HTTP functions and globals in a request and response object
• separate dev and prod environments
• ajax integration - like defining a div as draggable in PHP
• explicit support for initial and test data

Well having found the Definitive Guide to Symfony a bit uninspiring I’ve spent a bit of time on the “Practical Symfony” book - online.

http://www.symfony-project.org/jobeet/1_2/Propel/en/

So far it’s great - the first “three days” lessons went by pretty quick, and I’m glad I’d done some background reading.

An interesting post from Lullabot today on problems with Drupal’s Schema API and the Twitpocalypse

It turns out that the Schema API doesn’t properly understand the difference between different types of integers

CSS revolutionised web development, <font> and <table> were a nightmare in comparison.

But still there are times when CSS feels very limited, if you want to change a colour or margin size and have to hunt through the CSS to calculate the related changes.

But now there is

http://lesscss.org/

I’ve written a patch for Drupal 7 to enable date and time data types to be defined for the schema API.

http://drupal.org/node/200953

Update : it got removed

I’ve just been checking out the latest development version of Drupal 7 to see what this latest release will offer.

The official notes for the release are here: http://drupal.org/node/156281

This module makes it possible to customise the title of the pages which add nodes to Drupal site.

By default these pages have the title “Create a $node_type”