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Zyxware conducted a one day workshop on Python on 11th June at CDAC Trivandrum. The workshop was targeted at experienced developers who were about to take on a new Python project. The full day workshop was attended by 8 participants from CDAC, Trivandrum.

CSI Trivandrum and Zyxware conducted a one day workshop on Python on 28th July at Hotel Keys. The workshop was targeted at new developers who are interested in learning python. The full day workshop was attended by 28 participants from across different organisations in Trivandrum.

While trying to fix an issue with Drupal Views, I wanted to use a single custom table to store the char count of the body field of different content types instead of creating separate CCK fields for each content type to store the same. The question that came to my mind was how to integrate my custom database table with Drupal Views? Drupal's Views module provides a hook for doing this - hook_views_data().

Banking application packages are probably the most complex software suites which demand high security, faster transactions per second, massive database storage system, and highly efficient multitasking to support thousands of concurrent users. Banking applications have multiple levels involved in performing an operation. For example, a banking application may have:

Ecommerce used to be the preferred ecommerce solution for Drupal before Ubercart came into the picture. We recently worked on upgrading a Drupal 5 site with Ecommerce to Drupal 7 with Ubercart. The challenge with this upgrade was that the source data existed only in the D5 database and the corresponding code to programmatically access the ecommerce data was in D5 as well while the destination tables existed only in the D7 database with the corresponding code existing only in the D7 database. The solution we went with was to go for a full SQL query based migration to copy over the Ecommerce data from its tables to the Ubercart tables.

When migrating from Drupal 5, the normal path would be to migrate everything (core/modules/themes) to the latest Drupal 5 versions, and then to the latest Drupal 6 versions, and then over to the Drupal 7 versions. How fortunate would have been the developers assigned the job if everything was as simple as that!

The default behavior of drupal_redirect_form in Drupal 6 is to redirect the user to $_GET['q'] when an explicit redirect location is not set in $form_state['redirect']. So any form submission from a Drupal page with additional querystrings like in a paginated form (for example admin content listing forms or admin comment listing forms) will result in the querystrings being lost. This can be frustrating when you administer content from such forms as you have to click the pager link and go back to the previous page after form submission. This can easily be fixed by adding a submit handler for the form in question and setting form_state redirect correctly.

The default comment moderation system in Drupal 6 is crude at best primarily because of the limitation of the admin comment listings. The information that is shown by default are 'Subject', 'Author', 'Posted in', 'Time' and 'Operations'. Now the main objective of comment moderation is to reject spam comments. None of these fields give any information about whether the comment is a spam comment or not and you will have to view each comment by going to the edit view of the comment and then approve or reject the comment. This is a very laborious and frustrating process. You have three options to solve this problem and get a better comment administration interface - one is to create a comment view, another is to alter the default comment administration form and the third is of course a custom solution for comment administration.