This week I went to CiviCRM Developer Camp in London, UK. I must admit I've never used CiviCRM and downloaded and installed it for the first time the day before! The camp, which was un-conference in style, was held over two days, and over 20 people attended. It was meant to be a camp for experienced users, but given the varying degrees of knowledge of the people attending, I think it was less techy or advanced than originally intended.

Recently, for the first time with Drupal 6, I needed to create a form where a variable number of fields could be added to it by simply clicking a 'Add more' button. I wanted to design a node form where users could create a custom compilation album of their favourite tracks. However the number of tracks would vary from album to album and so I wanted a way for users to be able to add more fields to the form without reloading the page. Now, yes I could have used CCK to build this custom content type, but I wanted to see how this could be done using Drupal's FAPI alone.

Recently I needed a create a multi-step node form in Drupal 6. Unlike other forms in Drupal, it wasn't as simple as configuring a new submit handler that sets $form_state['rebuild'] to TRUE. After trying a few different ways and a bit of searching, I found the solution. The trick is to hide the 'submit' button and use hook_form_alter() on the 'preview' button to regenerate the form for step 2. However, this is probably best explained with some sample code to illustrate.

For a long time now, I've been using Tredosoft's Multiple IEs. It's a great little package that allows you to run multiple versions of IE on the same machine, from IE 6.0 all the way back to IE 3.0! Okay, now no one is running IE 3.0 any more (I hope!) but from time to time, people want IE 5.5 support (still! yes, I know!) and certainly IE 6 is, unfortunately, still being used. Before I found the Multiple IEs package, I was considering running several virtual machines, each with a different version of IE installed.

Recently I've been looking into various open source PHP development tools, focusing mainly on Xdebug, Phing and SpikePHP Coverage Tools.

Xdebug is an open source package of debugging tools for PHP, and is often called the "swiss army knife tool'' for PHP developers. It provides a number of useful features such as debugging, tracing, profiling and code coverage. It works well on a variety of platforms and there's also third party extensions for it for Eclipse and Firefox.

Just a few short months on and I'm back from yet another awesome Drupal Camp Ireland. Over 60 people attended having traveled from all around the country, and even from further afield such as Scotland, England and the U.S. The camp ran over two days and included many presentations from building a simple site to writing secure code to documentation. Not only that, but the Irish Drupal community also built brand new websites for three non-profits in Ireland, Zikomo, Rural Science Association and Shadowbox Theatre Company.

Two weeks after heading off to the US and I'm finally back home in Ireland. Drupalcon DC was fantastic and, while I'm glad to be home, part of me wishes it didn't have to end so soon! Twice a year it tantalises me with 4 days of non-stop Drupal talk, learning loads of cool stuff and hanging out with some really amazing people. No wonder I quit my job after Drupalcon Szeged and started working with Drupal full time - it's just an awesome community!

Some of the highlights of Drupalcon DC for me were:

After a number of months since the last official release, new releases of the Lightbox2 module are now available - versions 5.x-2.9 and 6.x-1.9. It's been a long time coming, but it's well worth it, with over 70 individual changes. There's a whole bunch of new features, and bug fixes too.

New features include:

• Full 6.x support for the imagefield, filefield and emfield modules!
• New 'download' link feature for imagefields and image.module images. This also means the addition of a new 'download original image' permission. (6.x only)

New releases of the FAQ module have been made - versions 5.x-2.12 and 6.x-1.8. This release includes a number of new features, including the ability to have multiple FAQ layouts and both short and long FAQ question texts. However the majority of the changes were small bug fixes.

The new features added include:

• #251493 - Ability to have both short and long questions (6.x only).
• #299191 - Ability to have multiple FAQ layouts (6.x only).

The third ever Drupal Ireland meet-up took place on Saturday 15th November and it was a huge success. Over 70 people attended, which is an amazing 5 times more people than there was at our last event, just a few short 6 months ago!

When in Drupalcon Szeged, Heather and I saw how active other groups were in different countries and regions and thought "wouldn't it be great if we could build a Drupal community in Ireland?" So we decided to run a day long Drupal event in Dublin to promote Drupal and help grow our community.