Update (since a lot of people still seem to be coming to this page): The latest version of PDT is 1.0.2, which works with Eclipse 3.3, and it is excellent. The Xdebug plugin is now part of the core package, and the instructions on how to use it are part of the standard help.

I decide to move into the word of real-time debugging today. I have been using the PHPEclipse plug in, but I could not find a 5.1.4 version of the debugger it uses. Fortunately, I was able to get the eclipse PDT (formally PhpIDE) working with XDebug.

_*Update*: I stand by most of the information in this article, but I have learned a couple of things in the last two month. I now recommend against pulling information directly out of $_POST or using form_builder. My Ahah Forms package can make a lot of this easier. Please checkout Secure Dynamic Forms and Subforms, Ahah_forms reloaded, and the examples in the Ahah Forms package._

Goal
To create a form widget that consists of an unlimited number of subwidgets, expands without needed a full page refresh, and can be easily added multiple times into any Drupal form.

Plan
Use hook_element to define the element, hook_nodeapi to handle the db interactions, and jQuery-based AHAH code to do the incremental page updates (AHAH – Asynchronous HTTP And HTML , not AJAX b/c there is not XML involved, and people seem to think AJAH isn’t sexy enough).

Quick digression from Ajax. The was a thread on the developers' list about drop down menus, so I thought I would share my approach. This is an pure CSS solution (The .css is probably too site specific to be generally useful, but I included it as an example).

Let’s start with a review for those who have not already drunk the ahah forms framework kool-aid: Ahah forms is a utility for attaching Ajax-style partial page loading to Drupal forms without having to code any javascript. This is similar to Ruby on Rails’ link_to_remote tag or form_remote_tag() function. The method I use to declare the binding is a custom extension to the formAPI.

Damn, just lost my first version of this post. I need to see about getting the autosave module working

I am working to wrap my brain around Drag & Drop in Drupal. Interface, the jQuery UI plug-in, seems like the best place to start. I am using jjeff’s expiremental jQuery Update modules so I can use the latest version (v1.2).

Wow, the Summit was quite something. My head is still spinning from all the new info. I think my session went really well. Got some good questions, and feedback. Still need to figure out how to do the dynamic forms thing without opening up a security hole. More on that soon. Until then here are my slides:

Working out callback ordering is tricky
There are now lots of levels of callbacks to work with:

1. Old node hooks (hook_load, hook_form, etc)
2. nodeapi hooks – based on $op, they all happen after the corresponding node hook
3. hook_form_alter – replaces old hook_nodeapi:form call
4. Validate and Submit callbacks set up in form with FormAPI – So there are now potentially 3 different places to do validation

There was a push a while ago to get Drupal to use the tango icons, which was then pushed back, since Tango’s license is CC and not GPL. I don’t fully get the distinction, but here are the GPL icon sets I have found:

• Lullabot Icon Set #1
• Morten’s Iconify Module
• Mark James’ Mini famfamfam set

I just released a beta of my new experimental administration UI for the Drupal menu system, Quick Admin Menu. As opposed to my Ahah work, this interface is very client-side heavy, with only a couple of Ajax calls back to the system. This project is all about pushing the envelope in terms of ease of use.

Check out the demo. (You will not be able to submit the changes, or use the “Add item to Menu” link)

Well, according to my my page tracker, lots of people are interested in using Eclipse PDT and Xdebug, so I thought I would give a quick report on upgrading to PDT RC3. Note: I see the XDebug plug-in v0.2.0 is out. At the moment, I am still using v0.1.3
Update: Looks like I can’t keep using v0.1.3. Upgrading to Java6 has triggered this error when debugging: An internal error occurred during: ‘Computing hasChildren’.
I just downloaded v0.2.1, dropped the two jars into the eclipse plugins director, deleted the old jars, started up PDT again, and so far so good.