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One question I'm often asked by many other diocesan web development teams/individuals is how we put together our online Mass Time search (also used for searching adoration and reconciliation times). We also get questions about how we do our online mapping—but I've already covered that (see: Beautiful, Easy Maps in Drupal using Views and Mapstraction).

The Archdiocesan Mass Times search interface (click to enlarge)

We already have a database provided by the Archdiocesan IT department (they maintain it with the help of our diocesan Parish Support staff, and parish secretaries who can update their own schedules and information), so we needed to do the following on the web:

• Import all the Sacrament time information and attach it to a parish node (so times/days could be affiliated with parishes).
• Display the time information on parish node pages, in a meaningful way.
• Allow users to search by Sacrament times, showing parishes on a map, and showing the Sacrament times in a list under the map.

I'll cover each of these important aspects of our website's functionality below.

Preliminary note: much of this code was provided originally by the great folks at Palantir, who helped us set up this and many other features on the Archdiocesan website...

Importing time information, attaching it to Parish nodes

The first step in the process is importing some 3,000+ parish event nodes (which contain data for each 'event' - the event time, the event type (Mass/Reconciliation/Adoration), whether the event is a 'Normal Service' or a special kind of Mass, the location of the event (often in a side chapel or somewhere else), the event day, and the reference for the parish to which the event is attached.

Our site uses the Migrate module to import all the data, and we have the module set up to import all the events first, then import the Parishes, attaching the events to parishes (through custom code) using a node reference. Continue Reading »

I was scratching my head after trying to troubleshoot a template problem for a few hours today; I was building a Zen subtheme for a site that had, until now, been using Garland for it's styling. In this subtheme, I wanted to have comments display with a similar look to Garland, and I especially wanted automatic permalinks to comments, referenced by a comment number:

I looked through comment.tpl.php, and my template.php file, as well as zen's template.php file, but couldn't find anything related to the $id variable, which is used to build the numbered permalink. After opening up Devel themer, I found that there was a call to _zen_preprocess_comment(), and that was the likely culprit...

To restore these comment numbers/permalinks, you will need to grab core's TEMPLATE_preprocess_comment function and place it in your subtheme's template.php file. (This is an easy fix... if you'd like to get more advanced, you can hack the code to do other more Zen-like things, like print 'first' and 'last' classes for comments).

Be sure to change TEMPLATE to the name of your theme!

After you do that, your theme should have comment styling very similar to that of other core themes, with the permalink comment number intact (see below for the final product).

(numbered permalinks ftw!)

What is open source without people who freely give of their time to make open source projects better? It's no source at all!

In the spirit of good stewardship and Christian charity, the code/files in the Open Source Catholic website's theme was released today (around 1 a.m.!) on drupal.org as "Airy Blue," a 'contrib' theme. This allows anyone browsing Drupal's directory of themes to download it and use it on his own site!

We encourage everyone to think about how many benefits they derive from open source projects like Drupal, Wordpress, GIMP, and Linux distros every day, and to give back in any way they can... even if it's just a few bucks for beer!

Check out the newest Drupal theme: Airy Blue