Fixing Drupal core!

Drupal 4.7.4 has a bug in it regarding story previews. The teaser preferences allowed you to set the maximum length of a teaser, but the underlying code treated it as the minimum length of a teaser.

So, say you wanted a teaser that was 400 characters or less; what you would get was a teaser that was always 400 character or more. Ouch.

This bug was biting me on one of my client’s sites, so I thought I would tackle it. I posted a patch (a small piece of code that fixes a larger piece of software). And after some discussions and revisions…

My contribution to Drupal was added to the upcoming Drupal 5.0 release! Woo-hoo!

In the past year, I’ve contributed bug fixes and feature enhancements to many contributed modules, but this marks the first time that some of my code made its way into the more stringently-coded core of Drupal. So I’m feeling particularly elated. Plus, it’s a bug fix that many people will notice.

Yeah, I know. I know. This is a pretty geeky posting. But I know that other coders will understand my euphoria.

(My even-geekier PHP-preview-related patch was committed today, as well. So that’s two in one day!)

If you are interested in how to contribute bug fixes to Drupal, head on over to “HOWTO: Submit patches for Drupal.”