Dave Reid

I've been looking through all the Drupal content access modules for a nice module to use on my other blog, davenjenny.com. I've been looking for the following features:

• Per-node access restricted by user roles
• If a node is restricted to user, have an option to show a nice message like "Sorry, this post has been restricted to uses with the following roles: registered user, friend."
• If the node is restricted to registered users and the current user is anonymous, also show a message like "Please create an account to view this content."

Probably the closest thing to what I'm looking for is the Node Privacy by Role or Content Access modules, but I'm almost leaning towards rolling my own module.

The 6.x-1.0 beta2 version of the FeedBurner Drupal module is now available, bringing the last few major features I wanted to get in, mainly the email subscription and feed count blocks. My primary focuses for the module are now: Views module feed integration, back-porting the module to 5.x, documentation, and testing. Please give the new version of the module a try and report any bugs! I think I'm also going to try and get my module reviewed by the wonderful chx and Morbus of Drupal Tough Love.

I will have to be closely monitoring the status of the Feedburner to Google Feedburner transition. As of now, the module still works just fine if you have your feeds served by Google. You just need to change the MyBrand domain in the module settings to 'feedproxy.google.com.'

And of course if you like the module, please donate to my laptop fund or review it on drupalmodules.com.

UPDATE: I decided this module was too specific and had no room to grow at all, so I created a new module, Statistics Advanced Settings that includes an improved version of Accurate Read Count.

Well that was fun! In about a total of two hours, I was able to code, cvs commit and create the project page for a new module of mine, Accurate Read Count. I think that's pretty good for only my third module.

So what does it do you ask? Do you like seeing how many times your content has been read using the core statistics module? Did you know that every time you view a node, even if you're logged in, the read counter is incremented? Any Drupal user could easily inflate the read counters just by normal site administration alone. Crazy! I've been keeping track of bug #90468: Only record unique hits in node counter stats and I even tried my first core patch there a while back. Seeing as this bug is not going to be fixed in Drupal 6.x (the bug is slated to be fixed in 7.x), I decided to create a simple module that would work with the core statistics module and disregard any non-unique content views.

UPDATE: I just released Drupal 6 alpha version of the module ready for testing! Go get it!

So to everyone who's been using my FeedBurner module for Drupal, I'm sorry that development has stagnated recently. I've noticed that lots of people have been wanting a Drupal 6 port of the module and have had to (sometimes unsuccessfully) resort to using .htaccess hacks.

Things should be getting better shortly. Now that I've resigned from position at HuHot (which will warrant a more personal, longer post), I should be able to better balance normal stuff with programming. I've begun porting/developing the module for Drupal 6.x and will not be working on the 5.x version of the module. Maybe at some point I'll be able to maintain two different versions, but for me right now it's a little difficult. I'll get better at it I suppose. My goal is to get a beta release of the module out by August 4th. I also hope to have a job by then too. Thanks for your support and patience.

If you want to help even more, you can donate to my replacement laptop fund (my laptop is my primary development machine and dying). Just a little plug for that.