Planet Drupal

Hello everyone, if your wireless drops or if you do not have a laptop just use your smart phone. The mobile site has a useful interface to view the schedule by day and by track.

I am hosting a BOF in room 206 at 4:15pm today, Monday to present how we created the mobile version of the DrupalCon website. The mobile version will automatically load for all webkit based smart phones.

I spent a long time today trying to figure out how to customize a Date field in Drupal 6. The field is called field_recurring_dates and looked like this:

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An example, like a picture, is worth 1000 words. Until recently Drupal programming examples existed but were spread among documentation pages, blog posts, and the Drupal CVS repository; some searching required. That changed in late 2009 with the introduction of the Examples for Developers module. Its purpose: "to provide high-quality, well-documented API examples for a broad range of Drupal core functionality". Now you can find high-quality, working Drupal 6 and 7 code examples in one place, many with SimpleTests.

The Examples for Developers Module, or simply Examples Module, is actually a collection of modules. Each sub-module contains a single, specific example of how to use an API or implement a feature. At the time of writing there are 17 examples:

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Welcome to the second part of the Drupal theming nightmares series. Not really surprised by the feedback I've got in the previous post. Most of you were enough lucky to stumble on the same problems. While the post was focused on the theming mistakes, it raised a discussion about unfinished jobs too. So if you haven't read it, it is right here: Drupal theming nightmares part 1.

That day, when I found out what I will be working with, I wasn't able to fall asleep (and it wasn't because of the litres of green tea I had). I was thinking about the person/company that wrote it, whether they are haunted in theirs dreams, do they even care? They should, you should, we all should. Take some responsibility for what you are doing. Do it right. I tend to ask people: "Would architect build a house ignoring physics?" Of course not, if he did, people might die. In our binary world we say kittens might die. Familiar right? But this could be another blog post. Lets move on.

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This is an Apache Directive that I've never had to use before, but it came in very handy for a very specific problem.

There was already an apache redirect (RewriteRule + RewriteCond) in place, but the destination URL was case sensitive! That's not normally a problem, but it was for an ad server, and the variables were coming in as uppercase, but needed to be lowercase after the redirect. Bad programming on the part of the ad server in my opinion, but we're not going to let that stop us! :)

RewriteMap to the rescue!

First off, the actual directive is a lot like a function definition, and it can only go in a config file or vhost, it's not allowed in a .htaccess file. Luckily the one we want to use is built in, so we just make it available with:

RewriteMap lc int:tolower

This makes the "lc" function is available in our rewrite rules. We start off with the condition and basic rule ...

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Barry and I just met with a team from Northscale -- the startup formed to support and extend Memcached, the popular key-value cache used by the largest web sites. We learned about their new database project, Membase, and talked about how it could help high-volume Drupal sites including our Acquia Hosting customers.

Membase is built on the core Memcached technology and supports the Memcached API. I'm excited about what they've done to extend Memcached: Read full article »

Earl Miles and Young Hahn join Dave Burns, Jeff Eaton, and Jeff Robbins to discuss the similarities and differences between Drupal's Panels and Context modules. Earl is the creator of Panels. Young is the co-creator of Context as well as Features, Spaces, and several other great modules. We open up the cage, toss everyone in, and see what happens!

Also be sure to check out David Burns' article "Assembling Pages with Drupal," which also compares and contrasts Panels and Context.

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Earl Miles and Young Hahn join Dave Burns, Jeff Eaton, and Jeff Robbins to discuss the similarities and differences between Drupal's Panels and Context modules. Earl is the creator of Panels. Young is the co-creator of Context as well as Features, Spaces, and several other great modules. We open up the cage, toss everyone in, and see what happens!

Also be sure to check out David Burns' article "Assembling Pages with Drupal," which also compares and contrasts Panels and Context.

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Testing out the Drag'n'Drop Uploads module to see how it works.

So Mollom absolutely stinks, as far as I'm concerned.

I just posted this comment on a site that is not mine, but is a Drupal site running Mollom: http://www.istos.it/blog/drupal-training/open-sourcing-drupal-training:

The Examples for Developers project is an open-source training initiative. I'm trying to get it used for developer training and to have books on Drupal development use it for examples instead of rolling their own (which invariably get out-of-date and can't be maintained.)

I encourage you in this (vast) initiative.

And what did I get?
Your submission has triggered the spam filter and will not be accepted.

That's about the fourth time I've taken the time to write a comment on a Drupal Mollom-enabled site, and gotten that kind of a response. How many comments are being rejected inappropriately on sites that use Mollom? Who will ever know?

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I just had the chance to listen to the latest DrupalEasy Podcast published earlier this week, where Ryan Price and Mike Anello interview Jacob Redding on his work, book, and Drupal's general greatness in many fields. Jacob was an early supporter of the Localization server idea that was built out to eventually power http://localize.drupal.org, so it was great to hear that he gives some exciting coverage of the topic (at about the middle of the podcast). He explains the Localization client and its connection to the server and how these two interact to get as many people submit translations as possible. If you are not using the Localization client yet, this might be a good time to look at it.

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As Drupal gains popularity, the need for developers is increasing and consequently so is the need for trainers. Let's make sure that the first point of contact for people to the community is a positive experience by open-sourcing our methods of teaching.

How do you explain Drupal to someone completely new to both Drupal and to content management systems? What are the metaphors that people have found work best?

How do you go about introducing hooks and the menu system to developers? Views, Panels, CCK, Context?

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Setting up a Wysiwyg or rich text editor in Drupal is a straightforward task: you download the Wysiwyg module along with the library of your favorite editor and you're good to go. You will run into issues when you're using CCK multiple value fields though:

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This week we launched modulecraft.com a fundraising tool that we want to use to raise interest, involvement and money for the development of a series of tools for Drupal professionals. Pure donation systems like chip-in have a pretty bad track record, but a donation/reward system has to our knowledge not yet been tried in the Drupal community. When you donate you will be contributing to the community AND getting something valuable in return.

We launched the platform with Documentation+, our first fundraising effort which primary aim is the development of a Documentation distro for Drupal.

For a couple of years now, people in the documentation team have been wanting to implement a DITA architecture for the documentation. DITA is an open standard managed that was initially developed by IBM that is now managed by Oasis. It is fairly young, but has gained a lot of momentum in the documentation industry.

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This tutorial is sponsored by the Save Joseph campaign. Only 6 more days to save one man from a roomful of teeth. http://savejoseph.org.

I've recently been using the Evernote module to blog, which has made my life surprisingly more rich. After building the module, I started using it right away and found it was the missing piece in creating a workflow that would encourage quality, rapid posting - something I've always wanted to be able to do. Now that its set up, I feel like I can write with virtually no overhead, and using images - kind of tricky when using webforms and wysiwyg - is about as easy as it can get. Even adding annotations is super simple with Skitch (writeup for a workflow with Skitch is imminent).

The ease with which I can create content made me wonder if maybe I could run an entire Drupal site's content off of Evernote. So I gave it a shot when setting up http://josephcowman.com, and it worked like a charm!

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We're very proud to see the first fruit of several months of work and several year of building the Drupal enterprise eco-system in Israel.
The first site shipped, http://shituf.gov.il is a site which exposes the latest rules and discussions from the government to the public.
That way legislators get a very short feedback loop on the current activity and the public gets to state it's opinion and vote up or down on the stream of new rules and political activity.
This "political digg" is the first time in Israel where official governmental activity is letting the public create content in the website and the first time Drupal and it's underlaying open stack is used in official governmental hosting.
The site is seeing great engagement (for instance a rule about monitoring the state of israeli education had 544 votes, divided almost equally and hundreds of comments.
Shlomi Tsadok, Our reprasentitve in the government has led this project and we are showing day after day the flexability, ROI, lower TCO and general awesomeness which is Drupal.
YADGSCTL - Yet Another Drupal Govermental Site Comes To Life (I'm not sure about the popularity of the acronym, but Drupal is gaining popularity in Enterprise Israel and that what counts :) ).
World Domination is now.

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Thu, Jul 29, 2010 by Bono

View and CCK are great for doing a lot of cool things on Drupal sites. However, at the same time there are a few things beginners should beware of when using View and CCK.

1) Filter out those 'not published' contents -- this is probably mentioned in every tutorial, book and video... yet once in a while someone will forget to do it. If something is not set to 'published' you should avoid showing it on your live site.

2) Save that view or you will lose it -- Sometimes beginners will mix up the 'update' button with the actual 'save' button at the bottom. Update is for applying the current changes in your field, filter etc. Nothing is actually saved until you press that 'save' button. Even if you can see the changes in the preview it doesn't mean your changes are saved.

3) Which view are you editing? -- After you saved a view the focus shifts back to default view. If you have a page and a block view under the default view and only want to edit one of them then make sure you select the right one before making changes again.

I have recently added drush and drush make packages to my openSUSE repository. For more information or to report bugs on the packages please visit their respective project pages: drush and drush_make.

To install the packages you can use the one-click installers provided by the build service or manually add my repository and install the packages as shown bellow.

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There are approximately 38 critical issues that need to be resolved before Drupal 7 beta gets released. For more on these beta blocker issues check out: Drupal Core Improvements.

With this post I want to encourage you to install Drupal 7 alpha, test it out, and ultimately help to fix the critical issues and speed up the beta release.

You'll need a localhost LAMP or XAMPP environment to follow along with the examples here. If you don't have one set up I recommend using the Acquia Stack Drupal Installer.

Once your testing environment is configured, download Drupal 7.

Installing D7

Save the installer to your localhost Drupal /sites folder and extract it. Set up your MySQL database using your preferred method. Note to developers: D7's new database abstraction layer will theoretically support multiple database types including SQLite, PostgreSQL, MSSQL and Oracle. So if you are running Oracle you may be able to use D7.

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Many sites have views that are used to generate a large number of sections/pages on the site, and you may want to easily change the number of results without having to edit the view. It's easy to create a settings page that will allow you to configure the number of results.