Everybody recognizes Drupal 5’s shiny default theme. Because you can create a custom version just by choosing colors, it’s used at hundreds, if not thousands of Drupal sites.

Many people know it’s called Garland. Few people know that it was designed by Stefan Nagtegaal.

Unfortunately, both his MacBook Pro and his iMac got killed by a power surge. If you want to enjoy another killer theme for Drupal 7 (Stefan is working on the successor of Garland!) then please chip in and help him get a new iMac!

For one of the projects I’m currently working on, we needed to be able to store monetary values. This seems utterly simple at first, but there are many details that need attention.

The obvious one: multiple currencies. Luckily, this was easily solved by using the excellent Currency module, which includes a Currency API module, written by Khalid Baheyeldin of 2BITS. The tricky part is the ability to read from and write to different number notations (and thus store the amount notation-independently). The number one thousand for example is written like 1,000 in the U.S., but it’s written like 1.000 in Belgium. In the U.S. they use a dot as the decimal separator, in Europe a comma.
The default decimal separator is the comma and the default digit group separator is the space, this is conform with ISO 31-0. A function to parse numbers (the most difficult part) is absent in PHP, one to format numbers however, is present.

Add these lines to your ~/.bash_profile if you’re using the Bash shell:

alias ddiff="cvs diff -u -F^f -N > "
alias dhead="cvs -z6 -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal checkout drupal"
alias dupdate="cvs update -dP"

Now you have three new commands at your disposal:

ddiff : Usage: ddiff patchfile.patch, creates a patch file.

dhead : Usage: dhead, checks out Drupal HEAD in the current directory.

dupdate : Usage: dupdate, updates the current directory recursively.

Update on August 10, 2011

While cleaning up my ~/.bash_profile file, I came across the following functions that I’ve used for many years and shared with several other Drupal developers. These are now obsolete, thanks to Drupal.org’s migration from CVS to git.