Locologic Limited

There are, apparently, many ways for clever people to install PHP with php-cgi on OS X but this is the one that worked for me.

Use Homebrew to install the Homebrew PHP formulae provided here: https://github.com/josegonzalez/homebrew-php.

There are several ways to install the php brew with php-cgi but the following worked for me on OS X Lion:

This article introduces the Date Repeat Presets module and describes when, where, and how to use it.

Browsing history is a key feature of many websites and one that I needed on a site I was working on. I’d seen it on a number of shop sites: most often as a block of recently viewed products, but also as a full “Your browsing history” page such as on Amazon.com. I hoped that there was a module I could download that would give me an instant fix. There wasn’t. Those that I did find were very limited and fell short of my requirements which after seeing Amazon.com were fairly comprehensive:

1. Maintain history of different content types, visited categories, searches, people etc.
2. Flexible display of users history - e.g. block display in the side bar and full page display of users history under their “My account” page.
3. Keep history for anonymous and authenticated users.
4. Allow user to enable/disable browsing history, and allow them to clear their history.
5. Be fast - i.e. don’t cancel out the benefit of increased personalisation with slower response times.
6. And as a bonus: Recommend other content based on users’ browsing history.

Clearly I needed a bespoke solution. This article describes how I put my browsing history feature together. It’s not a step-by-step “how to” - more of a guide to the general approach, techniques and potential pitfalls. It wasn’t completely straightforward partly because I was reluctant to write any custom php including any UI entered php evaluations. In fact I got a bit obsessive about the php thing and ended up writing 2 modules and a number of patches to fill in missing functionality. The results of my efforts are available as a Features module - Browsing History - which can be seen working at my browsing history demonstration site.

I’m a big fan of Drush Make which does a very good job of bringing repeatable builds to Drupal. Watching all your site dependencies get downloaded, patched, and installed is very satisfying. Used together with Profiler and Features it’s possible to have a completely configured site all ready to go, or all packaged up ready for deployment. But there are some features or modules that resist, requiring a little post-build tweaking to get working. Authcache is one of them. Here I describe how I got Authcache working for my browsing history demo site straight out of the box.