The book jQuery in Action is no light reading. It's not the type of book you can read in a couple of sittings. I started reading my copy several months ago. It might easily become one of the best three-to-five computer books I'll read in my life. I am reading the excellent appendix now, titled: JavaScript that you need to know but might not! Boy did I totally not! I will dump what I am learning here in two installments.

It is common to wish to remove the time of day shown in the node “submitted” line. In Drupal 5, there were no less than three ways to achieve this, and I will present these when I'm done covering date formatting for Drupal 6. Drupal 6 allows you to modify the different formats for dates in the Administration area of your site, these different formats being small, medium and large — yep, just like pizza, oh... my... god... You could do the same in Drupal 5. However, you then had to pick among a finite list of options. In Drupal 6, you can create an nth option, if you like none of the options presented to you. Read more →

Administrators are shown with a themable marker whether content is new or has been updated in the Administration section of their site at webSite.com/admin/content/node. Additionally, in node lists, the module tracker informs any logged-in user if he or she hasn't read a particular (recently created) node (using the marker new), or if a node he/she's read already was modified (using the marker updated). You, the themer, may want everyone, including “anonymous users”, to be informed of updates to nodes right inside their content. This information may specify who last edited the node and when. Note that the last editor of a content may not be the creator of that content, and I'll take this into account in my “solution”. In the following theming tweak, you'll add Last edited by name some time ago information to your nodes' content. Read more →

In Wordpress, unlike in Drupal, terms are not lumped together in posts. Each Wordpress vocabulary has its own “template tag”, and the ones that come out-of-the box are: the_tags(), and the_category(). The following theming tweak is about putting order in Drupal terms before they're output to screen. It you need to break up your terms by vocabulary before you display them, read on.  Read more →

You want to add quick edit links to the teaser view of your nodes — one link to edit the node, and another to delete it, and you want these links to be shown only to users with the 'administer nodes' permission. Alternatively, you may want these links to be viewed only by the user with uid (user ID) 1. Read more →