Okay, I think I'm done now... mostly... n.n

(Also, this post ended up LONG!)

But I've mostly gotten things set up the way I wanted them, now. Here's some of the annoying things I had to contend with:

1) The user login box had odd formatting for the list bullets. I was actually ranting to Kalli about this for a while. I finally fixed it, by taking out the line-width argument the creator of my base theme (it's called marinelli, by the way) stuck in the loginblock CSS.

2) I made the BAD mistake of trying to activate the theme developer module packaged with devel. I don't know WHAT was wrong with it, but it started eating my PHP memory like crazy whenever I loaded the modules page. Geez... I had bumped up the max allocation in php.ini to 40M and it was still trying to allocate more! And it started spitting bunches of raw code at me, too.

I actually had to go into the database to manually deactivate that monstrous module. It's either bugged to high heaven or doesn't play well with my theme... I have no idea. But it had me frothing for a good long while.

3) Again related to devel... I usually keep it activated to keep track of how much memory drupal is using, and how quick the site loads. (My loads are staying within less than a second when caching is activated, and about 13-15MB of memory. Yeah, Drupal's a memory hog.)

But for some reason, when I activated Views, devel started spewing the db queries my views were making along with my memory and load time reports. And I couldn't find ANY way to turn it off. I thought that poor coding practice... I mean, seeing those queries is useful, but I don't WANT to see them all the time.

I ended up having to go into the page.tpl.php of my theme and disable the 'print $footer' PHP statement. Which is a little bit annoying because I don't know whether I may ever actually WANT to print whatever's in the footer info.

I just don't get why the people coding devel didn't just have all the reports print the same way. Bleh.

4) Just now I was growling at the collapsible fieldsets that Drupal uses, because for some reason it wasn't collapsing properly... usually, when the fieldsets are collapsed, you only see a single line that's the same color as the border surrounding the set when it's fully exposed. But instead of getting the single line I was getting an empty box with nothing in it. It was a slender, compact box, but I'm a perfectionist... it didn't look RIGHT to me so I had to fix it.

So I flailed around looking at the original style.css going "WTF?! I only changed like, one line of the fieldset CSS!" until I realized I'd stuck an !important at the end of the statement defining the fieldset border. I guess the !important meant that the entire border (as in, all four sides of it) would always show, despite the javascript telling it to collapse into a single line.

I even remember having this problem before... gah! So I'm writing it here JUST so I can remember it for later. :P

5) URL aliases... I mentioned this before. Well, while was doing my great tag cleanup / rearrangement (which, actually, lasted for a couple WEEKS at least because I kept getting indecisive about how to split between tags and categories) I ended up creating a category hierarchy. This meant that I needed to have all the categories default to showing all terms beneath it, including those belonging to its children.

Now, this would be fine and intuitive, if that was actually drupal's default behavior. It's not. :P The category links only list whatever nodes/items actually contain that specific category. For example, if you consider my Video Games tag, which is under Hobbies... I wouldn't be able to click on Hobbies and get Video Games posts plus Music posts and Books posts and everything else Hobbies-related.

However, it IS possible to force the taxonomy system to show a category + all of its children down to the last leaf... you have to put /taxonomy/term/[tid]/all, for a taxonomy term numbered [tid]. You don't usually see those taxonomy links on my site 'cause I have them all aliased to other things.

The hard part with this is making sure every category always has the '/all' at the end of its URL. My first solution was to go into the URL aliases and make all the aliases pertaining to categories point to their respective /taxonomy/term/[tid]/all paths. Then I stuck some code in the node.tpl.php that always appended '/all' at the end of category URLs it displayed.

This worked, but... there were some downsides. Mainly, my pathauto, which kept recreating the URL aliases without the '/all' -- basically, duplicates, which were cluttering my URL aliases list. So I always had to delete them EVERY time I wanted to change the order of, or edit my categories in ANY way. Annoying, to say the least!

So I went searching on drupal.org for a better solution. In the end I decided I'd have to hack taxonomy.module again. (Or, in drupal 6, taxonomy.pages.inc). Fortunately, the hack is simple: I just had to change the $depth argument of function taxonomy_term_page from 0 to 'all' (with the single quotes). Which worked nicely... but as a result I had to go and remake ALL of my URL aliases, both the category and tags ones, and that was irritating.

Fortunately, I remembered I could bulk update with pathauto, but still, it wasn't a very fun experience. n.n Now that it's done, though, I can move and edit my categories without worrying about the URLs messing up.

Which leads me to 6) ...yeah, now it's the WEIGHTS that are messed up. Drupal 6 tries to be helpful by determining the weights of each term FOR you, since there's this fancy AJAX method of rearranging categories and menu items and such now. But the order doesn't work with my category print statements, because they end up all out of order.

How to explain... well, basically, the weight count restarts at 0 whenever a child term is reached. So, I had a bunch of child terms with weight 0 relative to their parent, but when it's time for taxonomy_node_get_terms_by_vocabulary to print out my categories per node, it sorts by weight... *without* taking hierarchy into consideration. So I ended up with some severely messed up ordering for the categories (tags are irrelevant, I have them all with weight 0 / listed in alphabetical order).

What was my solution for that? Why... manually editing alllll the categories so they have weights that correspond with what I expect the order to be in the node category print-out. But I'm not sure that if I went and messed with the AJAX again, it won't just reset the stupid weights again. Grrrr, how frustrating! Sometimes I really think fancy-schmancy things like AJAX can do are just more trouble than they're worth.

There could probably be a 7) and an 8) and... so on... but I'm getting really, really tired. I'm going to RELAX tomorrow, I don't care what needs doing. :x Especially since I've got plenty of games to prepare for... and I've neglected Dragonrealms. Grrr, I'm especially mad about that, because I really wanted to be around in game this week but just *couldn't*, and now I've got ED *and* Soul Collectors to prep for.

Bleh, no use crying about it, I guess... I needed to get the drupal upgrade done sooner or later, before drupal 7 comes in. Hah. That would be pretty sad, if I couldn't even beat the next version.

BTW, this new layout I have for darksiren's domaine actually has a random banner option on it, but I only have the one banner, so I just made it static. Jon made the banner for me (with a photo, he didn't take it himself but it was taken from one of those royalty-free sites) and also did a lot of the transparency on the icons that you see all over the layout. Thanks Jon for helping me out, and for weathering my swearing and pulling of hair while I put the new site together.

Well, I guess it's not really NEW new. Which is why I kinda blanked out on giving it a new name. It's not quite chrysalis 3.0... though I was tempted to call it Third, just 'cause I've been listening to so much Portishead. (Still LOVE this album, too... can't get enough of it!)

Aaaaand now I'll stop babbling and go to bed. Probably.

(Oh wait, I do have a #7 -- that stupid autocomplete functionality in the input field for tags. No one else will be able to see it, since it's only visible for people actually making posts, but the transparency is all messed up on the panel that displays when giving suggestions for completion. I don't know WHY... it's been like that since Drupal 5. But I loathe CSS so much that I'm probably going to give up trying and end up being stuck with it for Drupal 6, too.)

(#8 -- another reason why AJAX sucks. I ended up having to disable the stupid floating tableheaders for IE altogether, because they just *don't work*. Even on IE7 it displays this ugly grey bar at the top even when the tableheader should be hidden, and I'm *tired* of having to go through mounds of CSS and drupal files to figure out WHERE it went wrong. So, I just went into /misc/tableheader.js and disabled the whole thing for IE, like so:

if (jQuery.browser.msie) {
  return;
}

Sigh... I almost hate AJAX as much as CSS by now. I HATE unnecessarily fancy crap on websites. *grumble*)