In case you didn't hear about it yet, Raincity has acquired Bryght (my Raincity acquisition story) This is the first time I've participated in a formal press release. As a blogger, I find the language of press releases a bit un-natural and it sure is weird seeing how 'press releases' work e.g. how some more 'traditional' websites basically just re-publish the press release as news without adding any commentary. Hmmm sounds like a lot of bloggers. Or how people respect or don't respect embargoes. Thinking out loud: would be great to have a tool to graphically monitor the flow of news through the web starting with a blog post or press release.

Anyhow just some meta musings before I have my first coffee! I am stoked about joining Raincity Studios! Go Raincity go!

Inspired by Ohloh, and a need to start scoping migration of a large cluster of Drupal sites from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 5.x/6.x, I've started some work on a static analysis / code metrics tool specifically intended for PHP / Drupal.

Code is available from Bryght's public svn repository, with repo URL https://svn.bryght.com/dev/svn/scripts/metrics.

The metrics.php program is currently implemented as a command line script, which is pointed at a directory containing code to be analyzed:

Reports are generated on standard output.

History

This code started from the sloccount.php script written by Arto Bendiken. I've tried to extend the script by making it more comprehensive and precise, but also more flexible and general. The architecture is intended to be pluggable, allowing users to easily write analysis tools for new types of files.

Currently there are two supported file types: generic, and PHP.

The 'generic' code analysis supports 'C' style code, with in-line comments initiated by '//' and comment blocks set of by '/*' and '*/'. This gives rough metrics for javascript and CSS files.

The PHP analyzer uses PHP's tokenizer and a rudimentary parser to obtain additional information about PHP code.

Analysis is completely separated from reporting: the analysis phase builds an array of metrics per file, where each metric can itself be structured.

Raincity Studios has put together an excellent intro on how to contribute to Drupal as part of their prep for Disguised Drupalist Debug Day aka DDDD. If you are in the hood today October 31, 2007, come on down to 1 Alexander Street Suite 400 and 420 and join us! We'll be here until 5p.m. ish

Inspired by Darren's boring site note—which I usually find interesting—about his trying out a new WordPress plugin to his blog, and a brief email conversation, I developed the What Would Seth Godin Do? module.  It uses code from the WP plugin written by Richard K. Miller, adding a block to Drupal 5 sites for the first few visits people make to the website, with a friendly message to that visitor.  The administrator chooses how many visits constitutes a few, and what the message might be, such as 'how to get started' or, currently, a link to the site's main RSS feed.  The block disappears after the number of visits set by the administrator.

The way it works is that it adds content to the enabled block if the visits are under the specified number, tracked through a special cookie, and if that number is reached, the block's content goes blank.  (Drupal blocks do not display if there is no content to display.)  The name of the module is inspired by a blog post Seth Godin wrote last year arguing that new users to a site should get a little more help than frequent visitors.

It took about a half day to write, test, create the project on Drupal.org, and re-learn the correct steps for checking it into CVS, and fix silly bugs like leaving in the dummy text during the initial checkin.  Oops!  I still have the module flagged as 'developmental', since I haven't done enough testing, and would like to make sure it works across browsers.  It's a pretty simple module, so I would love to hear feedback about it before tagging it for a 1.0 release.

[UPDATE: download the original high quality MP4 file from our awesome friends at blip.tv]

A portion of Jonathan's portion of the Drupal Deployment Session at DrupalCamp LA September 9, 2007 at AOL Beverly Hills. The full session was recorded by Jonathan on his cool 3 chip camera and will be posted later.