Upcoming.org: Seattle Drupal March Meeting
Adaptivethemes: Field Type Suggestions in Drupal 7
Today I finally got around to testing out the new field suggestions in Drupal 7. If you’re not familiar with the standard suggestions in short you can either use field templates or override theme_field using a naming convention not unlike we do with preprocess functions. What struck me as kind of odd was the lack suggestions for field types—maybe there’s a very good reason for this such as performance, I don’t know, but I thought it might be interesting to see if I could use them, if I wanted to.
Drupal Blogs, Pictures, and more on WordPress: Offline Drupal Handbook and API documentation
In the next couple of days I will again be doing iterative releases of an offline version of the Drupal Handbook. A long time ago I was creating them for Drupal 4.xx and 5.xx. Suddenly there was fierce competition from those close to Drupal.org. So I thought that eventually offline versions would be the norm. Unfortunately two things happened. First Drupal.org started a project where they traded print HTML pages of the handbook for OPML. They never quite got to the point of automating the process of converting OPML to XML and then to a format that supports the easy creation of compressed HTML files. Printer-friendly pages are the basis for creating good windows help files. Later on down the road all the sites that suddenly were producing offline documentation faded into the ether. Drupal.org never adopted any server routines for creation of any type of offline docs either.
Fusion Drupal Themes: New faces at TNT
In all our recent excitement, I have neglected to introduce the two newest members of the TopNotchThemes family!
Stacy WrayStacy joined us a few months ago to provide some much needed assistance with themer-herding, customer support, bookkeeping, and generally supporting our team. She’s the friendly face you’ll talk to first if you have any questions about our themes. Stacy is also involved with the rebirth of the Drupal Dojo/Kata, and has been upping her Drupal nerd cred on a daily basis.
Sheena Donnelly
Dave Cohen: Drupal for Facebook at SF DUG
I had the opportunity to present my project Drupal for Facebook, at the San Francisco Drupal Users Group.
Drupal for Facebook let's you build Facebook Apps with Drupal. These apps allow users to register on your site using their facebook password. Or, place your content within facebook.com. It's flexible, lets you build features the way you're used to (The Drupal Way), and can give your sites social features that would otherwise be impossible.
Big thanks to Conrad for providing the video. And to John for inviting me to speak, and everyone at Parisoma for hosting.
Boombatower Development: Upgrading theme() calls with Coder Upgrade
A lot of effort has been poured into the upgrade routines for Coder Upgrade as evidenced by the green check marks on this page. (A side note: so far, duellj is the only person to show up for the upgrade barn raising and much thanks to Jon is due. If you are up for a challenge, help is still welcomed and needed to write and/or test routines.)
An interesting example of an upgrade routine is the theme() function call change. This upgrade involves "array-itizing" the variable parameters. For example, this:
<?php
theme('user_list', $users, $title);
?>
becomes in D7:
<?php
theme('user_list', array('users' => $users, 'title' => $title));
?>
The twist involves finding the keys for the associative array of variables.
Sparing the details, Coder Upgrade will insert the proper keys for any theme defined in D7 core files (includes and modules directories) as well as themes defined by the module being upgraded.
CommonPlaces e-Solutions: New White Paper – “When to Use a Multi-Site Architecture”
Are you planning to build multiple websites for your business? Before you do, read out free, 9-page white paper, “When to Use a Multi-Site Architecture,” to learn more about the significant savings that multi-site can deliver. If your goals require multiple websites, a multi-site solution could cut your development and maintenance costs in half.
Here’s an excerpt from the white paper:
“More often than not, one website can deliver everything an organization needs, and help them achieve all of their goals.
In some cases, however, your goals may necessitate multiple, related websites. Perhaps you want to build upon the success of your resource site for plumbers, and offer one for electricians as well. Maybe you want to create an online university, separate from your main site, and offer courses to your current users. Or maybe you want to customize multiple online stores for different segments of your customer base, but offer many of the same products to them.
Lullabot: Drupal Voices 79: Daniel Kudwien and his many Drupal development contributions
Daniel Kudwien (aka sun on drupal.org and tha_sun on IRC) of Unleashed Mind is a prolific Drupal contributed module author, but also Drupal core developer.
He discusses some of the well-known modules that he helped author and maintain, such as WYSIWYG, Admininstration Menu, Image Assist, Inline, and Demonstration Site.
He's taken it upon himself to make sure a lot of the Drupal 7 APIs have been standardized and cleaned up as much as possible, and also rallied a lot of help on tackling Drupal's oldest standing task of "Node 8," which is allowing users to cancel their own accounts. Sun also gave a heroic effort on helping on many of the different exception patches during the code slush period, and fellow developer chx commenting that he's never seen anyone sprint for Drupal.
Kristof De Jaeger: Contextual links backport - more or less
Drupal 7 now comes with the contextual module which makes it very easy to edit your site as there are inline action links available on your content, blocks and so on. There are a few modules out there available for D6 - block edit and admin:hover come to mind - which offer the same functionality but are different when it comes to interface and/or extendability.
We decided to write a new module from scratch with the UI in mind of the D7 version, also taking care of performance and the need for easy extendability including hooks (duh) and static actions which allows us to have a static variable during the page request which can collect stuff from all over the place. You can test it out at http://demo.customsource.be/content/home with demo/demo. Surf to the 'articles' page which has contextual links for views, nodes & blocks.
What happens next ?
Development Seed: Drush 3.0: More Powerful, Flexible, and Magical
Over the last few years Drush has matured significantly and has seen an incredible uptake in usage. It's become indispensable in the day to day workflow of innumerable Drupal users and has been accepted with open arms by contributed module developers who are finding new and wonderful functionality to expose via its clear command line interface.
What not many people realize is that beneath this simple command line API beats the heart of a far more flexible and powerful beast. Drush was written with re-use and scriptability in mind, with this entire concept deeply ingrained in its design, and this is a large part of what gives it its power and flexibility. This will be even more apparent in Drush 3.0.
Below is a rundown of some useful things you'll be able to do with Drush 3.0.
Localize.drupal.org: More improvements on the staging site, feedback is still welcome
I've announced our staging site for localize.drupal.org two weeks ago, and some people did take on the opportunity to test out the site and provided valuable feedback. Fixes and improvements are rolled out continually on the site. Since the staging site was set up with a completely revamped user interface to translate text, the following changes made their way onto the staging site:
Dries Buytaert: City of Athens using Drupal
The City of Athens has launched a new Drupal site to serve as its official website, along with a Drupal-based site at http://www.breathtakingathens.com/ that provides visitor and tourism information.
Athens is a large city (3.5 million residents and 6 million tourists each year), with a large tourism base due in part to its role in the 2004 Olympic Games. To support the city's needs, the site includes a large calendar of city events, a comprehensive map-based index of city services and interactive tools that allow citizens to access city resources. The site builds on Drupal's multilingual capabilities to provide information in both Greek and English.
Stella Power: Migrate module: migrating a node's taxonomy terms
One of the issues I encountered when migrating nodes to Drupal, using the migrate module, was that I couldn't associate nodes with more than one taxonomy term. Actually in this example, I'm migrating content from one Drupal database to another, so I'm going to assume everyone is already familiar with the database structure, specifically the node and term_node tables.
When I first started using the migrate module, I ran into a similar problem with migrating a user's roles. It's not possible to just create a Views relationship (aka LEFT JOIN) between the node and term_node tables using the node id. This will produce one row for each node and taxonomy combination, but the migrate module is only able to handle data sets that contain one row for each entity. With the above solution, I have more than one row for each node, which causes the migrate module to import the same node more than once, causing all sorts of problems.
Like with the user roles example before, we can overcome this by implementing a migrate hook, specifically hook_migrate_prepare_node().
Drupal Blogs, Pictures, and more on WordPress: I'm considering to make blogging a real habit
So, the longer it goes, the more I find out about the WWW.
It is truly a wondrous machine. Do you remember learning about the human’s quest for the perpetuum mobile? What? You haven’t? Look it up. It’s worth your time.
See? I just made you move without using any of my energy. The internet moves all day long. And most likely not out of its own volition. It is being moved by thousands, even millions of people all day long. It never sleeps, it never eats.
But humans create the content, so it doesn’t move by itself. Well, yes, if it were only one human who made all it move, it weren’t a perpetuum mobile. With half the world online, aren’t we more like one gigantic organism, like ants?
Instead of communicating by hormones, we communicate by bits and bytes. Even when I sleep, somebody looks at my facebook stuff, and, maybe, leaves a comment.
I fully stand by those commas above, by the way. Don’t ask me to give you the rules, but I know those commas go there. If you can credibly prove me wrong, you get a cookie.
Drupal Blogs, Pictures, and more on WordPress: Drupal Project for Weslata
First post on Weslata (that’s the name of the site for now but surely it will be changed). I have chosen Drupal as the website’s content manager. Found it to be very easy and in tune with the website idea that we came up with.
I am now testing Drupal, MySQL, PHP and Apache on a local computer. I have run into some problems configuring the webserver and PHP but now they are resolved.
I am now going to setup MySQL and then install Drupal using WAMP Server. Looking forward to my first site with Drupal.
Drupal Blogs, Pictures, and more on WordPress: Drupal CSS for forms, collapsible settings, comment
Flickr: Tim Berners-Lee Shows AfghanistanElectionData.org in TED Talk on Open Data
DevelopmentSeed posted a photo:
In his TED talk on open + government data, Tim Berners-Lee showed afghanistanelectiondata.org/data - built on Managing News and Drupal - as an example of what is being done with data that's opened up.
Check it out (3:11): www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_....
Drupal Blogs, Pictures, and more on WordPress: Acquia-Prosper new theme made my site all grey!
OMG – I just had such a massive panic because I thought that I had lost the site appearance, all my css work. I thought it was somehow never goibg to work again.
I uploaded the updated acquia-prosper theme , which was fine. But the site went back to being grey colours and not all the colours I had chosen for it and spent DAYS adding into the css file. But it was ok coz I had a back up and I just uploaded the css file from before.
But then it didn’t work. Itwas still grey.
So I restarted the computer and swore at it and that didn’t work. Then I did it again and again and again and that didn’t work. And then I went into firebug for a look at it and I saw that my css file was being recognised but that it was being superseded by a new file called gray.css. So I went and had a look for this and in the updated theme there is a folder called design packs where there is a css file for gray and one for blue. And these are above the css file for the general theme.
I’m not going to use these as I have the look of my site all sorted so I just deleted the whole folder from my site. And now everything looks as it should do again – PHEW!
Justin Miller: Drupal module: Advanced Comment Trigger
I have to admit that I've got it pretty good in the website spam department. The Mollom project, started by some of the same folks who started Drupal, uses content analysis to keep spam users from registering accounts on my site, leaving blog & forum comments, and using my site's contact form to spam me via email as well.
The only problem that I've really seen is the rise of spammers who will post blog comments containing text from the blog post itself, almost entirely unchanged, along with one or more links to their sites. Content-based analysis is of no use here, since the majority of the comment is actual text that I would want on my site -- after all, I blogged it!
Until now, I've been following all blog comments to my site via built-in RSS feeds, noticing spam comments some time after they were posted, and going back and deleting them. Drupal allows for comment moderation, but I want comments to go out there right away.
