Posts Tagged: Drupal

Here’s a little something I figured out just recently. Let’s say you have Ubercart installed. Let’s say also that you want to add a custom field to the uc_orders table. There are a couple of ways to do this.

Most of my Drupal experience in the last year has been either purely back-end development, or superficial front-end stuff: JavaScript, AJAX, tweaking templates and styles, that sort of thing. But in the last couple of weeks, in two different projects, I’ve been digging more into theme development, menu management, and various other issues.

Consider this problem: you want to disable a few fields on the node edit screen for particular node types. Let’s say the body, although this could apply to any and all fields. The reason for this is that for our client’s e-commerce system, the products are synched from an external POS system, and most fields should not be touched AT ALL… and certainly shouldn’t be overwritten with content copy-pasted from MS Word, which has happened a few times and prompted us to take preventative measures.

I’ve been working with Drupal a lot in the last few months, and enjoying the hell out of it. Every day I’m learning some new tidbit, some interesting new scheme that at first seems confusing, but them usually makes me go, “Wow, that’s brilliant!”

Blame my lack of experience with Drupal. This week I was held up on a weird problem, and for once the online documentation didn’t seem to be helping.

I was coding a module, with a number of parameters. To keep things tidy, I decided to group them in fieldsets. And, not being too clear on the consequences, I set those fieldsets’ #tree parameter to TRUE. Here’s what it looked like: