Nary a day passes without some prognostication by our local realtor bloggers saying everything has turned around and the market is headed back up. What is most surprising about these is not that there are sales people who believe that they can still sell snake-oil but that there are sales people who haven't taken the time to understand that 2008 is not 2006 or 1989. Consumers are better informed and have access to more information than at any point in the past.

What is most surprising is that some of the very same folks who are trying to high-pressure customers into buying now are doing so online. In the very same environment that gives consumers access to the actual information about what is going on. Real estate sales people can say "the market is turning" till they are blue in their faces but we'll still know that the rate of foreclosures is increasing. We'll still see the new house each week that is bank owned on our streets. Read more about Real Estate Bust

Working on a site using the jstabs module this evening I came across a bit of a challenge passing named anchors to the #redirect element of a form. The desired url for redirection in this case was /user/myuser#profile-tab-7.

Asking in #drupal led to the following tidbit from chx. (This is one of the many reasons Drupal is wonderful since Google searching didn't produce results and my experiments and requests of friends didn't produce the answer.) Anyway the challenge is that #redirect causes the form to call drupal_form_redirect() which in turn calls drupal_goto(). The drupal_goto() function takes the path, query and fragment as it's first three arguments.

Off to a great start at Drupal Camp PDX. Ben Kaplan and Andrew Morton are kicking off the day with what Drupal is and is not. Some great analogs are being used to illustrate what Drupal is and is not. Of course having a Drupal Camp in the beautiful Portland area makes it all the better. Read more about Drupal Camp PDX

Working on the Forum Thread module I came across a bit of a challenge. On one user's site the call to add an inline javascript file (drupal_add_js()) was being called from nodeapi twice. Since it is calling inline javascript drupal_add_js happily puts the script on the page twice.

In this case the script in question calls a "toggle" function to hide and show the comments on a given forum node. Since the script was there twice it obediently displayed and then immediately hid the comment body. Evidently users aren't keen on this method of speed-reading.

The solution then is simple. Use an external .js file. However, in this case to make the module easy to configure I wanted to allow users the choice of which css element identifies a "comment title". (An aside that the way this works is to hide and show the siblings of the title which does impose some requirements about how the comment is formatted.) So this makes it more complex because I want to include the proper selector in the script and still include it in a file.

To accomplish this I ended up splitting the jQuery function into a couple of separate calls. The first, an inline script, does an addClass to the user-identified comment title class. Then a file-based javascript acts on the newly added class to hide and show the comments as a website user chooses on each page.

It is possible to see the results in action.