It’s easy to take Drupal’s built-in user management features for granted… out of the box, you can configure your site to allow user registrations, reset forgotten passwords, and handle user logins. We had a use case where we wanted to combine the login and registration forms into a single landing page for anonymous users, to encourage users without an account to sign up with a single click rather than hiding the registration form behind another link.

Texas Lutheran University has started the fall semester with a new Drupal based online application system designed and developed by Proof. Their applicants are able to create accounts and complete the multi page application in one or more sessions, saving progress so that they can return at any time. The application includes detailed biographical and geographical information, education history, interests and more.

Drupal 5.x does not support HTML image inputs (<image type="input" src="..."/>) out of the box. A common solution to this limitation is to provide your own theming function to handle any buttons you want to turn into images, as described at http://drupal.org/node/144758.

The Drupal Form API is a wonderful thing... once you've been using it long enough, it's easy to forget all of the laborious validation and post-submit processing you used to do by hand for each and every HTML form in your solution.

The FAPI does things its own way, though, and if you're building especially complex forms that involve multiple steps or dynamically generated options, you may encounter the following error upon submitting your form:

After some debugging yesterday, I released a new version of the Value List module for Drupal 5.x. It fixes a small bug that can intermittently occur due to whitespace between list items.

Value List 5.x-1.2 is available at http://drupal.org/project/valuelist.