The current issue I’m having is that nodes created by the aggregation module get their taxonomy stripped when they’re updated because of how another module uses the security functionality, which is just hilarious in a site that’s largely organized organically by taxonomy. So, after talking with the people I’m working for on the site, I ended up creating a simple PHP script to run through cron that fixes the issues ‘the hard way.’

If you check out this query…

function fix_object($name, $sqlcon)
{
  $query = "SELECT term_data.name name, term_data.tid termid, node.nid nodeid, node.title title FROM node LEFT JOIN term_node  ON ( term_node.nid = node.nid ) LEFT JOIN term_data ON ( term_data.tid = term_node.tid ) WHERE node.type = 'aggregation_item ' AND node.title LIKE 'Xxxxx " . $name . "%'";
 
  // Perform Query
  $result = mysql_query($query);
 // ... and so on...

You can see that this is a fairly normal sql query that looks for all the nodes of type aggregation_item and titled a particular pattern. Because of the way the joins are structured, that means that any nodes that have lost their taxonomies will have NULL for termname and termid. Those nodeids with NULL termids can then have the proper taxonomy entries stuffed back into them…

function insert_taxo_4_node($node_id, $taxo_id, $con)
{
  $query = "INSERT INTO term_node (nid, tid) VALUES (". $node_id . "," . $taxo_id . ")";
 
  $result = mysql_query($query);
  // Check result
  // This shows the actual query sent to MySQL, and the error. Useful for debugging.
  if (!$result) 
    {
      $message  = 'Invalid query: ' . mysql_error() . "\n";
      $message .= 'Whole query: ' . $query;
      die($message);
    }
}

I’m largely posting this up in case people run into the same problem — this is a hilariously simple fix for a difficult to fix problem in drupal, but it’s a generic information architecture issue of what to do when the system that you’re working on is unreliable. I should probably mention that the issues with security in drupal aren’t related to authentication, but instead are related to item ACLs denying access to things for strange reasons, and are not crucial security bugs in the OMG MUST PATCH NOW sense.

Because of BM’s nature as a largely community-driven and volunteer-based organization, their management priorities are a little different than other organizations. It’s very simple, really, and I can sum up the difference in three words:

RESPECT EMERGENT BEHAVIOR

This shows up in a number of ways, in respecting the ideas that volunteers come up with, in coping with what emerges from chaos every year, and in generally planning from middle-up or bottom-up instead of top-down when possible. The respect emergent behavior is a spin of mine on it, but it’s something that I’ve had as a part of my core management philosophy for a while, so I was suprised and pleased to hear burning man talking about it.

My current interests (this week) are macintosh development, semantics (RDF), embodied philosophy and category (Lakoff), drupal, iPhone development, good coding practices, and project lifecycle management (from soup to nuts.) My interests next week will be getting a website off the ground that I unexpectedly ended up owning after a contract fell through. That was suprising and not entirely pleasant, but will see what can be done to have matters turn out positively.