Jonathan Jordan's Blog | Metal Toad Media

Using the Harvest API to Build Custom Reports

We use Harvest for time-tracking, which is simple and easy to use. For most users the tools on the website will be enough, but if you need to create a custom report or want to share data between Harvest and another application, you can use the Harvest API. I'm primarily a PHP guy, so using the Harvest PHP library makes it even easier. This post will demonstrate how to use this to create a custom reporting tool. In our case, we wanted to see how many hours a given user spent on weekends over a given time period. Read More…

Drupal 7 Tutorial: Porting CCK Modules from Drupal 6

by Jonathan Jordan, Web Developer

One of the biggest changes when it comes to module development from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, is the functionality of CCK module in 6 is now in core. For most this a welcome improvement to Drupal core, but due to the number of API changes, the process of porting your old CCK modules might turn out to be more of an undertaking then you originally expected. That is what I found out while working on a Drupal 7 port of the SWFUpload module. This post will walk through some of the key changes and challenges you might face, based on my experience with the SWFUpload module. Read More…

Drupal 7 Tutorial: Creating Custom Filters in Views

by Jonathan Jordan, Web Developer

I love views. It makes my job easier, so I can focus on the more complex things, rather then having to hand-write queries, create forms for filtering data and it saves time debugging my typos. Every so often you will get a request that can't be accomplished out of the box. If you are trying to customize the options in an exposed form, you may still need to do hook_form_alter(). Or, if you are trying to filter or sort your view by a field that doesn't appear in views, this short tutorial will show you how. Read More…

Why to Drop your Custom CMS for Drupal

by Jonathan Jordan, Web Developer

A little background. When I started as a PHP Developer, I took a look at a bunch of different content management systems and frameworks, both open source and licensed solutions. I found that most of them seemed either overly complex or to difficult to customize. So when my employer asked me to write a proprietary in-house CMS, I jumped at the chance. It wasn't too long, and I had created a CMS that had just the features our clients wanted and a simple to use interface. Read More…