Matthew Saunders: Drupalcon CPH - The Kitten Killers
Have we replaced the Drupal Song? At the end of the final session, the Killers played a new song, "I Can Be Your Module, You Can Be My Theme". It was a fun and silly way to end the main part of the conference and segue into the sprints.
The song was fun and sounds like it would be really easy to sing again and again and again.
Here's hoping it has been placed in the public domain.
Acquia: Facet queries? Making custom Solr facets for fun and profit.
It sounded like a really simple request: "Is it easy to add a search filter for 'My posts'?". In other words, add a search result facet for posts by the current (logged in) user through the Apache Solr Search Integration module APIs?
But then the wheels start turning - we want not just one blind link, but a real facet link that tells us how many results we'll get. Also, if we are filtering by 'My posts' then we probably have an equal use case for the opposite filter 'Posts not by me'. So we really need a facet block with two links and facets counts. Read full article »
John Forsythe: Major SEO Mistake Affects Most Drupal Sites
Every day, millions of people use Google Image Search to find pictures, products, and people. If you're using Drupal, chances are you're not getting any of this traffic.
Here's why:
Drupal's robots.txt file contains a major mistake. Amazingly, the mistake has been there for years, and very few people seem to know about it.
Lullabot: Lullabot's Back to School Sale
The school year is starting up, DrupalCon CPH is over and it's time to learn Drupal! For those of you who've been waiting for the perfect time to grab your copy of one of our awesome Learning Series videos, now's your chance to save big. Now through Friday, September 3rd you'll aget 25 percent off your purchase of any physical or downloadable product in the Lullabot store by using the coupon code SCHOOL25. That includes ALL of our Lullabot Learning Series videos and video bundles!
To get this special savings, just use the coupon code SCHOOL25 at checkout and place your order before the sale ends! Tell your friends and share it with others, there are no limits on this coupon code, but it ends Friday, September 3rd.
Visit store.lullabot.com (or click the "store" link in the menu above) and shop for whatever's been tickling your fancy.
agileapproach.com: Make your carousels start seamlessly at a random slide
Lullabot: Drupal Voices 157: Sean Robertson on Drupal in Politics
Sean Robertson (aka seanr) of NGP Software talks about some of the political sites that he's worked on such as Barney Frank, John Conyers, and Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights. He talks about some of the automation processes that he's been working on with the context and features modules with the NGP Campaign Features set of functionality. Robertson started with Drupal with DeanSpace, and talks about some of the modules that he's worked on such as the Forward module, and a bit about the evolution of Drupal as he's seen it over the last 6 1/2 years.
Chris Shattuck: Letter to a disgruntled module user
From time to time there's a bit of a sour post in an issue queue or blog post that makes it clear that there are misunderstandings about how the Drupal community works, and in this case it was a disgruntled post regarding lack of support for a particular module. It got my blood a-boil, and this was my response after I calmed down a bit:
Mr. Anonymous,
Perhaps it's the language gap, but your posts are coming across pretty harsh. Or, maybe you're just figuring out how parts of the Drupal space actually works and you're frustrated by it. That's understandable - it's tough realizing that Drupal isn't actually run by a team of tireless developers with infinite patience and no bills to pay - and I don't mind bearing the brunt of your frustration if I can help you and other folks in your shoes come to terms with a more accurate perspective.
From a user's point of view, in the ideal world every developer would have the time and desire to regularly pummel their issue queues into submission (like some people). In the developer's world, things look a little different. Most of us have enough going on that we have to prioritize what gets done, and that depends on a huge number of factors, including but not limited to:
Chris Mavergames: Reflections on DrupalCon Copenhagen
Last week, I attended DrupalCon in Copenhagen. Being relatively new to Drupal, but by no means a "newbie," I was hoping to both confirm that we're using Drupal well and to learn some tips, tricks and other insider info on how we can use it even better. I'm happy to report that it seems we are using Drupal "well" in that many sessions confirmed this - I was saying lots of "yep, know that module" and "yep, we're doing that with that module" to myself. It was all quite reassuring.
There were, of course, many new concepts, modules, configuration options, etc. that I learned about during the excellent DrupalCon last week. Some highlights...
Security
I attended an excellent session by Ben Jeavons on Drupal Security. Learning about the Security Review module was almost worth the trip to Copenhagen alone. Some other modules and links they mentioned:
Localize.drupal.org: One year of localize.drupal.org
Three days ago on the 27th of August, Drupal.org's localization service, localize.drupal.org held its one year anniversary. It is worth a look back and a look forward to understand how far we came and what kind of tasks are ahead of us still.
The new web based user interface for Drupal localization came to unseat the usual tools used to translate Drupal itself, and its modules and themes. Over 30 teams joined the first two months, and most others followed later. The site now hosts over 70 language teams and numerous are in the queue discussing best ways they can leverage our toolset.
If you look through http://localize.drupal.org/news, we kept improving our performance, make our user interfaces simpler, give team maintainers more control over their teams, etc. We flip-flopped from backend and bugfix updates to user interface improvements and new features. We were the second site on drupal.org to deploy the new redesigned theme and therefore serve as a good test case for how it works.
Gábor Hojtsy: Interviewed for Danish Radio P1
Anders Høeg Nissen from Harddisken, the P1 Danish Radio show was out at Drupalcon Copenhagen to report and interview people about Drupal and just generally spread the news. P1 is part of one of the oldest and largest media empires in Denmark, its parent company was founded in 1925 as a public service organization.
Dries Buytaert and Angie Byron were on the show being interviewed on their thinking of Drupal, and how they manage the flood of people coming with Drupal 7. I was interviewed to share some of the ideas behind my session titled "Come for the software, stay for the community - how Drupal improves and evolves". The radio host was interested in what I think are major drivers in Drupal's thriving community and how do we make it work. We got some of our thinking translated to Danish even.
I unfortunately don't know Danish (like probably most of my readers). If you know, a transcription / translation would be useful, thank you. In the meantime, you can listen to the show (MP3) mostly in Danish. (The first 25 minutes cover Drupal).
Drupal Blogs, Pictures, and more on WordPress: Drupal module of the day, String Overrides
Image via Wikipedia
The idea behind this is to have a collection of short posts commenting on when to use a particular module, its pros and cons. So, the first module is String Overrides, which is a module I had to use today (that’s why I picked it).
Well, this module is quite useful and we can consider it to be quite stable and supported. The fact that it will have a full Drupal 7 release when Drupal 7 is released is a testament to that.
What does this module do? Well, it replaces any text on the site with the text of your choice. This does not replace Locale (it could but I don’t picture this module being easy to maintain in this scenario) and is recommended when you only need to make few easy text changes.
Drupal Blogs, Pictures, and more on WordPress: Drupal 7 Entities
While looking at some of the differences between nodes and entities, I came across this interesting article explaining what entities are and when should one use them. It served as a good corollary to the existing documentation available on drupal.org about entities.
http://www.istos.it/blog/drupal/drupal-entities-part-1-moving-beyond-nodes
http://www.istos.it/blog/drupal-entities/drupal-entities-part-2-what-where-and-when-entities
One of the major advantages custom entities have over a node, is that, if there is a field inherently associated with that custom entity, and one would like to load that field data in just one query (may be performance reasons), it makes sense to store the field data along with the entity in the same row instead of having to query 2 tables, 1 for the entity and the 2nd for the field data
Ronald Ashri: The Federated Social Web and Drupal - Notes from the Drupalcon BOF meeting
The first meeting in a Drupal-specific context regarding the Federated Social Web took place at the Copenhagen Drupalcon. It was very interesting both because of the range of people interested and because we got a first-hand account of developments from James Walker who is a key part of the Ostatus effort. This blog post is a brief write-up of what was discussed and links to further information.
The meeting started with a series of introductions by participants including the reasons they were interested in a federated social web. The answers were very encouraging because in addition to the expected concerns regarding breaking apart silos of information and control (I am thinking of you facebook.com) there were also some very practical needs regarding interoperability and decentralisation in enterprise environments. This is great because noble thoughts (and efforts) on their own a federated social web will not make.
Gábor Hojtsy: Drupal couch surfers - an idea
As Drupal events grow around the world, more and more people find meetups and conferences closer to themselves. However, traveling to bigger events like Drupalcons can still be a financial problem for many. One of the solutions for this is couch surfing, where you could take a couch from someone who has it available in the host city for an event. Of course sleeping at an unknown person's place can be problematic. However, if we consider you already go for a Drupal event, and drupal.org has a profile for people with attached data on their activity, it can form as a reputation system. At Drupalcon Copenhagen, we discussed that maybe it would even be possible to build this tool as a group on groups.drupal.org (but definition of what is exactly needed is best to be done first).
I don't have the opportunity to help and build this tool but thought throwing the idea out would be useful for others to brainstorm and possibly help the community by making it work. We already had a nifty slogan for it when module maintainers couch surf: "I'm using your APIs, may I use your couch as well?"
