Round 2 of the Drupal Grand Prix will take place at Daytona Milton Keynes on Saturday 6th July. It's a great outdoor karting circuit that can host up to 35 drivers on the track at a time, and it's open to any UK Drupal companies and freelancers. (It's open to anyone outside the UK too, if you're up for the trip!)

Writing standards-compliant code in Drupal 7 doesn't have to be hard! Using the power of a modern IDE, it can help to show you where you're going wrong, and ensure that all your code is standards-compliant. Here, we'll take a look at setting up JetBrains PhpStorm (our favourite IDE) to show you coding standards problems, but any IDE with CodeSniffer support will be able to do this, so it's likely Eclipse, NetBeans, and others will also help you out in the same way.

It seems we're using an ever-increasing number of modules on our Drupal 7 sites, which are getting progressively more complex as clients (understandably) want more features, more eye candy and more value for their money. Some modules are downloaded from drupal.org, some are modified, some are written completely from scratch, and even features are modules. We've come up with a simple organisational method which we think ought to keep everything organised, and we thought we'd share this and let you have your say.

On 26th January 2013, the first Drupal Karting Grand Prix was held in Warrington, near Manchester, at speedkarting. It was organised by IXIS and featured 19 drivers (sorry Matt!) from various Drupal companies across the UK.

Being a fully indoor circuit, we anticipated no issues with the snow outside, but thanks to quite a few leaks in the roof, the track was wet in places, which just served to make things more interesting.

When using contextual filters in Drupal's views module, you can get information from the page's URL, and use it to affect the view. This works fine if your view is a page, such as a page of blog posts, but what if your view is a block, embedded somewhere else?

For example, what if you want to add a 'recent posts' block to each user profile, to show the top 10 posts they have made recently? By default, you wouldn't be able to do this, as views 3 in Drupal 7 cannot 'see' the page URL if the view is inside a block. Luckily there's a way round this.

PhpStorm is a great PHP IDE, but did you know it can also debug JavaScript pretty well too? Here's how to debug scripts using Google Chrome as a host web browser.

We just got back from DrupalCamp Oxford at the weekend, and there were a lot of good sessions. When you consider the ticket price was only £50 and included two 3-course lunches (both of which were way above and beyond the usual "Drupal event" food quality), it was a real bargain, but with so much information to take in, we thought we'd provide a quick summary of the key bits we took away from it.

Recently we were passed a large existing project developed in Drupal 5, and asked to make modifications to it pending a full upgrade of the site to Drupal 7. Given the age of the code and the fact that Drupal 5 has been unsupported for some time, none of the development teams machines had the necessary tools to work on it. What we needed was effectively an old machine with an old copy of Ubuntu to develop it on.

Recently I was tasked with coming up with a system for redirecting users to the correct version of a translated site based on where they were accessing the site from. Having spent some time looking on Google and Drupal.org I did not find anything suitable and so decided to write my own which I am now sharing due to the lack of resources on this subject.

Drupal 6 has a lot of database API commands, although one common task that continues to come up is how to get results out of a query more than once, without repeating the query. I've not seen this documented elsewhere so I thought it was worth noting.

Why bother?

Excellent question. Shouldn't I have written a better query? Our need was to go through the resultset from the db_query and work out the highest and lowest values, then, perform some complex maths on each row that depended on knowing the highest and lowest values.