Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Being a Drupal newbie with some web experience today I`m struggling with creating a form and using the input from that form to display items on the next page.

Unless I`m mistaken (which given my newbie status is perfectly possible) in a _form_submit you parse your data then return a link to the next page you are displaying.

When inserting and updating a page this works perfeclty because you point back to the page that displays the data you edited . But so far the only thing I found out that takes input from a form and displays it in the next page is by using a multipage form.

This article on Lullabot explains how to create such a page .. but I call that far from simple.
Anyone got a better way to do this .. Al I want to do is have a form where I can select some values, then based on those values get some data from my database and display that. There has to be an easier way than multipage forms. But this Drupal newbie can't find it :(

Next step is to get the above example working ..

about a decade ago:

Only the actual quote was.. I want the Green to be Greener

The folks from Krimson.be are organizing a couple of Drupal workshops in Gent
and even a full development tutorial day.

I already met half of the Krimson crew so I`m looking forward meeting the other half and learning from them ...

Maty Asay points us to .. yet another incomplete list of Open Source events on this planet

Now if one could just make either an RSS feed of this or a create a calender out of it so we can integrated it in our favourite calendaring client. Or just create a group on upcoming and keep that group consistently filled up.

They probably should already add Fosdem.org and Linuxtag.org 2007
as the dates for those conferences are already announced.

They should also keep an eye on Sven Guckes page as he has some updates on events.
and als on Martin Schulzes page

Anyone else knows some locations where to find good conferences ?
And yes the more specific conferences such as the ones on MySQL , Drupal or OpenOffice also deserve a place in that list !

A big welcome to all new readers redirected to this feed from Planet Drupal ..

But before you all start wondering let's make this clear .. as far as we know Dries and I are not family .. so stop asking :)

Don't start bugging me about changes you want to be made in Drupal,
Yes you can try to bribe me by buying stuff from my Amazon Wishlist , but you will be talking to the wrong Buytaert. I`m just a humble Drupal newbie, using Drupal for my own blog and some small projects just a hobby, won't be big and professional like... well actually like Drupal .
You however won't be the first to buy stuff off my wishlist , given the fact that I`m not new to open source and Linux in general.

Last weekend was T-Dose I was looking forward to see Bert's drupal talk but I was way to late in Eindhoven , just in time to see his last 5 slides Too bad I couldn't find him anymore after his talk.

Just after his talk I ran into Matt and Tarry , Matt is always present at conferences , often giving good talks on stuff I care about such as openQRM this time.

It was great to finally meet Tarry in the physical world, and not just the virtual one, so the Irish Pub meetup in the late afternoon really should be repeated !

The Woman without a blog told me about her involvement in OpenDocsSociety and the 2 upcoming launche parties.

I arrived way to late at the social event because of the Eindhoven Marathon parking issues we about to have if we didn't move Matt's car , but that way I ended up a a table with the guy from
Gravity Zoo, great stuff those guys are working on .. Looking forward to see some of their demos.

The Irish pub threw us out at 0200 , which was kinda Early.. but the result was that I made it only 5 minutes late for the Open Embedded talk. Now I really really want to start looking closer at OpenEmbedded as I feel it would be a really good solution for lots of the stuff different people are doing wrong , but then I need to get some time slices from an altnerate Universe ..

As promised in Cambridge I went to Dag's talk on Dstat as I ran out of it in Cambridge coz of some urgent phonecalls.
As I already have a private presentation about mrepo , I can now safely skip his next presentations :)

I had to run out earlier and drop off Matt at his car in the middle of nowhere before heading home. But T-Dose is growing at good rate. It's not yet big and overcrowded as Fosdem so at least you can talk with lots of people !

Every once in a while you start with something new.. you're used to being rather expercienced on different topics in open source , having written an article and a book left or right but there comes a day when you will feel a total newbie again :)

About 10 years ago I was mostly into technical webdevelopment , perl, php, oracle plsql , java servlets , coldfusion stuff like that.. I stopped building corporate websites about 7-8 years ago when I realised I was spending more time helping people to build the infrastructure to host those sites than actually building the sites. (That and the fact that I really got bored with people wanting greener green)

So fast forward to about 5-6 months ago where I suddenly felth the need again to start writing code for a small pet project of mine.

I wanted a framework where I could jumpstart with different features I needed such as usermanagement and a blog feature.

As I mentionned earlier this week .. everybody seems to be using Drupal these days and has similar newbie feelings :)

Dag is posting about his experiences on how to use Drupal as a personal blog. So my current project is different.

For a personal blog I wouldn't be using the blog module either has he describes, but as I wanted different authors .. I understood I do need it.

I had the same problem with the Vocabularies and Terms .. Upon starting I really didn't understand what they meant for my blog. So I recreated the categories I had in dotclear in there. I deleted them from my database after a month, when I figured out how to use tagging in the blog :)

So what do you need when you want to go one step further, like getting content from a database. So here is where the I probably went totally wrong and where the documentation could use a hand.

I started out writing my own module where I use some drupal functions and custom php code. Turns out there is something like CCK but I`m still not sure if CCK is the thing I need (or how to use it)

I`m pretty sure the way I`m writing my modules totally wrong also.
I'm having 1 big file in which I do everything.. Pretty crappy if you ask me but I don't really find another way .. Or should I create multiple modules ?

Luckily this is just a hobby, won't be big and professional like... It's just a project to learn and I got a different dayjob ..
However my fear is that other people probably won't realize how wrong the
are using a certain technology and will offer their services to customers :(

So I`m nagging some people about a new Drupal User group meeting.
Guess Dag and I will learn some stuff there ;)

Dag is creating Drupal packages

So I`m wondering if I should look into packaging different drupal modules. Certainly would help me
Anyone interrested ?

Lots of new and interresting stuff on the web these days.

First of all the Centos community has a planet.centos.org now. Were I ran into the brand new feed of Field Commander Wieers Dag was long overdue setting up a blog but he finally made it and he already pointed me to interresting stuff :)

Then there is Peter Vandenabeele who also decided to start up a blog.

And last but not least I ran into Dev2Ops , upon sending that link to a collegue he asked me if I was behind that site .. I`m not :)

Dev2Ops clearly is tackling the stuff I`m involved with on a daily base. How do you deploy and upgrade software and it's configuration for different similar machines in the field.
The have a couple of nice polls on their site which interrest me:
How do you disribute software releases for in-house developed applications? and How do you maintain
system configuration files?. Just go a head and vote . I`m interrested in the results.
My votes were on using pacakges (rpm/deb) using apt or yum and off course Puppet ! ;)

BTW.. It makes me wonder .. who is NOT using Drupal these days :))

Dear Future self,

The next time you run into PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined method DB_Error::query() and you are pretty sure all the correct libraries are installed , check if you can connect to the database with the username / password you have configured. Just as today you might have migrated to a new mysql server and forgotten to update the connection string.

thank you for your attention.