I am finishing a Drupal based project which required that I explore areas of Drupal that were new to me. The result is that I have some snippets of code to share for certain situations that might be generally useful.

The need to query LDAP directories arises surprisingly rarely for me. As such, each time, I essentially need to relearn how to do this.

I recently contributed to a PHP based project in which LDAP queries would be needed in certain circumstances, once per session. But in the deployment environment, PHP had not been compiled with LDAP support, and I couldn’t ask for this to be updated.

So, I decided to write the needed function in Java, knowing that LDAP support is part of the Java standard libraries and the server we were deploying to was a Solaris machine, so I knew Java would be available. I could then call the Java program from PHP. Clearly, this approach is far from perfect, but its portable and ultimately I felt it was the best way to work within the constraints of the system. And because such queries would only be executed once a session–and only for certain users–the performance hit of this approach was acceptable.

I’d like to talk more about what I expect to be doing this year, which as an experienced developer, might be somewhat interesting. Then, I’d simply like to speculate on how things that are already happening might play out.

In a previous post, “A Possible Approach to Importing Static Content Into Drupal”, I talked about trying to find a quick and dirty way to populate Drupal, in that case migrating existing static Web pages. What I came up with then wasn’t a complete solution, but I thought it might be a promising start.

Along similar lines, I recently started working on a site in which I created a custom content type with CCK and needed to quickly create multiple objects of that type using data from a client’s spreadsheet. After cleaning up the data in the spreadsheet (no matter how careful people think they are, they always enter dirty data in spreadsheets), I tried out a Drupal module that was new to me, Node Import.