modules

As described in How's that Ubercart review coming along?, my work on a Drupal ecommerce site using Ubercart came to a halt when Node Import refused to import my spreadsheet. I found and fixed the problem: Node Import was choking on a column that held paths for my nodes' images. (It was choking silently and demurely, which didn't help at all; a spittle-flinging "ack.. hack... image paths... hurk... killing me..." would have made my troubleshooting a lot faster.)

It seems Node Import wanted slashes in front of my paths (like this: /images/picture.jpg), whereas the book example I'm following shows paths without (like this: images/picture.jpg). I'll add more on that in the final review, but let me note that I can't say for sure it's an error in the book; perhaps the slash-less paths are correct under some setups, such as a different file system setting. (My sample site is using the Public, not Private, download method. Not that I know that that matters.)

In any case, for anyone having trouble getting Node Import to work, one basic troubleshooting step should be obvious: try importing versions of the spreadsheet with columns removed, one batch after another, until you can track down the column(s) with data responsible for the trouble. (You know, remove half the columns, so you test the remaining half; then reverse things so you test the other half... If one of those two variants causes trouble, then test that with first one half of its columns removed, then the other half... There's a name for this sort of thing, but I'm blanking on it. Computer-y people, anybody know?)

All right, back to the Ubercarting...

Here's the second installment of my Amazon and Drupal experiments.

First, a note on a topic I mentioned, the recent requirement that Amazon affiliates go to aws.amazon.com to acquire a new Access Key ID and Secret Access Key: The Amazon module kindly warns you right on your main admin page if your Keys are incomplete or outdated. Here's the message I didn't spot when I was troubleshooting things on my own:

The Amazon API must be configured with an Access Key ID and an Amazon AWS Secret Access Key to function. Go to Amazon API Setttings.

Helpful! All right then, on to a new feature, Amazon Stores:

How can you easily add Amazon product links to a Drupal site? If you've been working with Drupal at all, you can guess the answer: There's a module for that!

That would be the Amazon module. Yet... How do you use that module? As noted in this forum thread, the module contains nearly no documentation, and I failed to find anything among the Drupal.org handbooks. 

There's a little documentation on Drupal.org for the Amazon Store module but not for the Amazon module itself. This finding is repeated inside a comment at comment at Drupal Modules.com: "It doesn't have any documentation on how to use it but I found a lot out by visiting the issue queue and reading the user posts."

I'm trying to get Amazon working on another site, just a simple way to display some Amazon offerings alongside a node, or even an in-site "store". One solution, of course, is to paste Amazon code directly into nodes or blocks, but that's somewhat static; I'm interested in seeing what a module can do to improve upon that. Some problems and in-progress solutions:

A short tale of how I got the links page working after a Weblinks module upgrade broke it.

The ideal solution would be to track down the exact problem, posting issues and working with the module's maintainers, finally squaring everything away with the current module version. However, the issues page doesn't show anyone else having trouble with the module; the problem may be an obscure glitch related to my frequent abuse of this site for experimentation purposes. More importantly, at the moment I'm short on time to fiddle with this. I decided I'd just go back to the previous version of the module and be done with it.

Here's the process, including an unexpected problem necessitating light database vivisection:

My Available Updates page (admin/reports/updates) informed me of some freshly-scrubbed module updates milling at the gates. So I let a few in... and a couple of ingrates are soiling the carpet and wiping their hands on the drapes.

Web Links

Version 6.x-2.1 of the Web Links module did something nasty to my once-beautiful links page. There are now way too many terms appearing, most of which contain no links within. Those that do display their links oddly. I'm not seeing similar reports on the issues page. Must track down problem.

SEO Checklist

Version 6.x-2.0 of the SEO Checklist module causes various admin pages to spit out errors like this:

user warning: Duplicate entry 'sites/all/modules/seo_checklist/seochecklist.module' for key 1 query: INSERT INTO system (name, info, type, filename, status, throttle, bootstrap) VALUES ('seochecklist', 'a:10:{s:4:\"name\";s:15:\"\"SEO\" Checklist\";s:11:\"description\";s:52:\"A Search Engine Optimization checklist for Drupal 6.\";s:4:\"core\";s:3:\"6.x\";s:7:\"package\";s:15:\"\"SEO\" Checklist\";s:7:\"version\";s:7:\"6.x-

Mmm, that's good summer readin'!

Funny, the module's not even enabled. Enabling it and running update.php, I still get such errors in the update report and in admin pages... but wait, it's still not enabled. I can't enable it. I see someone's having the same problem here, so that should help me solve things.