In this post, we describe some of the issues facing large or complex software projects using Drupal's CCK content type extension facilities. We then propose a remedy in the form of CoCKTaiL, a high-level language for CCK types and associated UI elements and relations. Tools and potential applications will be described in future work.

Drupal's Content Construction Kit (CCK) is a powerful feature, much loved by Drupal developers, who use it to rapidly define data types and relations for applications. Using a UI, developers can easily create new content types by specifying fields, UI widgets, relations, and more.

The ability to interactively create new types and supporting UI's is a great timesaver in the early stages of many Drupal development projects.

For larger projects, however, the nature of the design and implementation process for CCK types leads to difficulties in evolving and maintaining projects which include CCK components, and these difficulties contribute to the lifecycle cost of large Drupal applications.

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Hot off the press, many of our themes are now available as Drupal 6 themes. Just in time for the stable releases that everyone’s been waiting for—CCK 2 and Views 2 for Drupal 6—you can now get an advanced theme for your Drupal 6 site from TopNotchThemes. Ubercart and Panels for D6 are also around the corner!

Our Drupal 6 themes have had a complete overhaul. With the new theme settings available in Drupal 6, you’ll have more of Drupal’s power in your hands. On one page you can easily personalize your theme for better SEO, configure the wording of common site text, choose how the author, date, taxonomy terms, and search results are shown, and more!

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I'm about a third of the way through Michael Peacock's Selling Online with Drupal eCommerce. PACKT Publishing sent me a review copy about six weeks ago which I have now gotten down to reading. So far it seems an easy read with simple instructions on setting up an online shop. Too bad it isn't available for D6 yet!

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I had four reactions to this, that went in this order:

1. CONGRATS
2. Does she have time for this with the book and everything?
3. Oh wait. She said the book would be DONE by Drupalcon.
4. CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!

I expect to see patches flying in (almost literally, except for the fact that it would take a while to fly from Montreal, her home base, to OSUOSL in Oregon, where the Drupal repositories are), especially testing patches.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more noise about this on the planet, but CONGRATS!

I'm happy to announce the rules 6.x 1.0 BETA 1 release. Check out the rules project page and try it. Now the API is frozen and modules developers are encouraged to write module integration and to port their workflow-ng integration to rules. You can find the documentation here.

To get token support everywhere in your actions you just have to install the latest development snapshot of it.

Now basically everything is there, including support for

• firing core actions
• grouping rules in rule sets
• scheduling arbitrary rule sets
• a module input evaluation system
• and much more!

If you want to know more details about the improvements done for rules 6.x check out the development status page or the slides from the drupalcon session.

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Whew. So day 1 of Drupalcon Szeged was a whirlwind of fun. Szeged is a very cool town. Lots of things going on, easy to get around and the weather is awesome! I'm not a good note-taker at all but here are the highlights for my day:

During Dries' State of Drupal presentation, he announced that webchick is the new maintainer for Drupal 7. Of course, Angie rocks and is taking the year by storm. It has been so cool to see her recognized so much for all the amazing things she has done and continues to do. I'm so proud to be not only her co-worker, but also her friend. Inspiring to say to the least.

Right after that I headed off to give my Gentle introduction to Drupal coding presentation (a PDF of the slides is on that page too). This was the first time I'd done this presentation and I got lots of really good feedback from folks who attended. It was quite a bit of fun and I look forward to expanding on intro coding types of presentations in the future.

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My self-appointed job is to hangout around here and complain about how CiviCRM could be more like Drupal or better implemented with Drupal. Instead of banning me from the forums and IRC for being annoying, Lobo gave me blogging access. So I'm writing to share about my latest campaign to Druplify CiviCRM.

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As you may have heard over on TechCrunch, the Acquia private beta program is in full swing. Beta testers are able to download and test our commercially supported Drupal distribution (aka "Carbon") and utilize our new web-based network services and support delivery platform (aka "Spokes").

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Today, on the first day of Drupalcon, Rasmus Lerdorf gave a fantastic presentation about PHP, performance, scalability and security. In this talk (the slides are available here), he discussed the writing of frameworks, and how they tend to trade off performance for what might be deemed as cleaner code. After walking through some very cool benchmarking methods (see slides 8, 14 and 16), he proceeded to benchmark some of the more popular PHP frameworks out there (slides 24 through 32). Unfortunately, when it came to Drupal, it was benchmarked without caching enabled. I have duplicated his Hello World module, and enabled it on a clean Drupal 6 install.

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In my previous post, I talked about how I implemented the dynamic marker system on OffRoadAtlas.com. In this post, I'll cover the functionality that the PdMarker adds to the site.

When you first hit the home page of the site, you'll see that the main content area is separated into two main sections: the narrow column to the left of the map (I call this the "info column") and the map itself.

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The Job queue issue queue has been quiet and I have been testing it with the development version of the API module, so it is time for a Drupal 6 release.

Day one of the Drupal Con in Szeged, Hungary. Morten and I made the initial keynote speech by Dries & Co. Well, almost. We were in the door about 4 seconds, there was some clapping, and we left. Couldn’t tell you why we were so late… ;)

Sam Boyer then presented a very decent overview of the Panels module, with some information about the direction of Panels 2 and what’s upcoming in version 3. The key fact that people are most likely hanging on for is the release date for Panels 2 under Drupal 6.

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Back in June I wrote about how to theme correctly in Drupal (Sustainable Markup: How to be a themer in Drupal). At that time I was working on a new website for Graycor, a leading provider of construction, maintenance and facilities services throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico. So much of what I wrote about in my last blog entry relates specifically to the newly launched (August 25, 2008) Graycor site.

We set 3 goals for ourselves before we started the prototype build out:

1. Avoid using tpl.php files where ever possible.
2. Create default CSS styling and reuse as much as possible, "Theme" don't "Skin"
3. Leverage the Drupal admin everywhere we could.

And we did just that. We succeeded in reaching our 3 goals on this site.

Let me break down for you what we did...

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I'll start with a slight introduction of who I am. My name is Nick Veenhof and I just graduated as a Bachelor in ICT with specialization in the webdevelopment domain at Kaho Sint-Lieven and a big fan of open source projects and communities. Having experience in PHP domain for quite some years and having done some Drupal projects when studying made me interested in applying for a job with Krimson as Junior Drupal Developer. In a few days after I was accepted (to be exact, 2 days!) I was bombed into the Drupal community world, in Hungary. Learning time!

So enough about me, more about Drupalcon and Hungary!

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So I came across this today whilst wasting time doing something useful:

According to the F.A.Q. Live Search Health "is a new search engine for the web that helps you to discover, learn, and act on answers to your health questions" - err...what?

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Oh, travel. I don't mind air travel, in general, but there are always road bumps.

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Each release of Drupal, Dries names one individual to share the responsibility of reviewing and committing code directly to the Drupal core.

During the opening presentation at DrupalCon Szeged (August 27, 2008), Dries named the Drupal 7 Co-maintainer: Angela "webchick" Byron! Lullabot is extremely proud to have Angie as a Lullabot, and we'll be doing everything individually and as a team to help Angie make Drupal 7 the most incredible version yet.

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Great Net Tuesday about Drupal and Non Profits tonight (check out the comprehensive as usual Mis 604 Live Blog from the event).

I'll lead with the last presentation, the genocide (with a spotlight on Darfur) prevention site, StandNow.org from Agentic that Phillip Djwa presented

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In case you are wondering where are the different areas in the venue, or need some help which we talked about in the opening presentation, you'll find the PDF of the opening notes useful.

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