Drupal

Today Lullabot released an exciting new project into the Drupal community. It's the Form builder module: an AJAX, Drag and Drop interface for constructing forms in Drupal. We hope that it will become the defacto standard in building forms in Drupal, replacing our inconsistent form-building tools that are spread across CCK, Webform, Profile, and other modules.

The Form builder project reads and modifies Form API arrays. Using a well-known data-structure that most Drupal developers are familiar with should make for low barrier to entry for utilizing the new module.

The project uses a AJAX-based interface for updating form elements. As you modify properties such as "Title" or "Description", Form builder makes requests in the background to update the element through Drupal's internal FAPI system. The user gets a live preview of their changes without saving the form. This approach means that no additional JavaScript needs to be written by implementing modules, since the rendering is done in PHP and then sent to the client as needed.

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Next week marks the beginning of Do It With Drupal, the three day conference made of pure awesome held in New Orleans.

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I've been working with drupal and have been a part of the community for a fews years now. Although I may not be the most active member around, I have attended a decent amount of drupal meetups all over Massachusetts and New York City.

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Through Safari Books Online, we got an early look at the upcoming O’Reilly book, Using Drupal, by the Lullabots, aka Angela Byron, read more

Spotlight Verlag, a well-known German publisher, recently launched another Drupal site: http://www.business-spotlight.de.

Udo Gerhards, Project Manager Online at Spotlight Verlag, explained to me that the site is targeted at language learners and that they built a number of complex interactive language tests; see here for a JavaScript based drag and drop test, and see here for a regular multi-page HTML form test. Development of the site was done mainly by their in-house development team, with some help from Auvica.

When asked, Udo told me that CCK, Views and Panels were the main reasons for using Drupal. Their biggest pain point was in staging their development environment to reliably push big changes to their production environment.

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In a recent tweet, Tim O'Reilly announced that the O'Reilly Drupal book is released from O'Reilly. The book will start shipping later this month so time to order your copies, folks!

I provided technical review of some early versions of chapters, and I can tell you that the book is as good as you'd suspect it would be from Lullabot and O'Reilly. The book does an excellent job explaining how to rapidly assemble a wide variety of websites using some of Drupal’s most commonly used modules. Whether you are new to building Drupal websites or an experienced programmer, by the end of this book, you’ll be much more prepared to build the Drupal site of your dreams.

I've always had a healthy fetish for O'Reilly books, so I'll dance from happiness the day the "Using Drupal" book shows up at my doorstep. Thanks Angela, Addi, Nate, Jeff Eaton, James, and Jeff Robbins!

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It was a funny week when it comes to squashing bugs in a few projects I'm involved with. Less is more and this is also true when it comes to debugging I guess, always look in common places if you encouter strange things. So here's a small list I'm really going to add on my checklist of debugging tips:

1: Always look in watchdog first. Almost everything within Drupal comes from the database and quite often when data is (partially) missing, it's because a query goes wrong. My use case: developer 1 defines some fields in the views ui and than implemented a views_query_alter hook in a module. Two days later, developer 2 decided to change the fields and poof, the query_alter completely freaked out, no content was shown and developer 1 didn't even knew about the views change. After 3 hours, he noticed the watchdog error and saw a field was missing.

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Drupal's tagging vocabularies are really useful when webmasters and admins can not anticipate what categories or terms content authors and editors are going to need. The pitfall however, is that it is too easy for content editors to make a mess of the vocabulary by creating duplicate terms that are spelled wrong, similar to or synonymous of existing terms. And a "dirty" vocabulary such as this can be rather difficult to clean up and can be a real problem if content needs to be structured.

The alternative is to create a fixed vocabulary which can only have terms added through the taxonomy admin UI. This avoids building a messy vocabulary, but does away all of the advantages of a folksonomy, or tags vocabulary.

I recently learned a technique that offers most of the best parts of both worlds. Here's the recipe;

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After working full time with Drupal for 2 months, I really needed a decent debugging interface. I was tied up with using dsm(..) and var_dump(..) all the time!

Also, my lovely computer and Eclipse decided they didn't liked each other... 64bit and Eclipse, it's still a mystery what exactly went wrong or what exactly went right... Now this fight is all over and my love (and my computers) for Eclipse is back for good!

Working with Visual Studio 2005 before I learned to like the 'breakpoint' thing in .net environments.
In my hunt for a solution, I found an easy way to get the same effect for Drupal in Eclipse (and to make it even harder, in 64bit! - but this guide will also work for 32bit systems).

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Crooks and Liars is an American liberal blog, which was founded in August of 2004, during the 2004 Presidential election, by John Amato. It was the first video style blog around, starting in a pre-YouTube era. Crooks and Liars has a team of about a dozen volunteers, including administrators, contributors and moderators.   Crooks and Liars has grown immensely since its birth, now averaging  over 230,000 unique visitors per day and over 330,000 page impressions.

Crooks and Liars originally started out on Radio Userland , which served as its home for two years. After that we started exploring other blogging platforms. At that time we were averaging around 100,000 hits per day. We decided to move to Wordpress , which could handle our smaller team of only 4 at the time.

As the site continued to grow and we were approaching the 200,000 hits per day mark, we started experiencing a lot of down time from server overloads. We were utilizing the famous wp-cache plugin for Wordpress, as well as hosting the database on a single master and two slaves, using the HyperDB class for Wordpress to handle the replication.

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Drupalcamp Colorado this summer was a rousing success. There were well over 100 registrants. We had two full days with sessions and quite a few BOFs. While a rag-tag bunch of do-o-crats did a great job putting the camp together, we found we needed more organization to make everything perfect.

• We wanted an easier time soliciting donations.
• We wanted ways to pursue grant monies.
• In short, we needed a nonprofit to help out.

Who better but a bunch of Drupal-heads to know the needs for such a nonprofit?

Come join a discussion on the ins and outs of putting together a 501(c)3 in a Birds of a Feather session at Drupalcon DC.

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My first book, "Using Drupal" will be shipped December 16, 2008. I co-authored the book with several other incredible Lullabots: Angie Byron, Addi Berry, Jeff Eaton, James Walker and Jeff Robbins. I'm very, very excited about the release of this book, not only because it's the first one I've authored, but because of the subject matter covered. There are several other books on Drupal (including the excellent Pro Drupal Development book, also authored by Lullabots John VanDyk and Matt Westgate), but none of them approach Drupal with such comprehensive coverage of actually using the software to build websites. It's also the first book to extensively cover contributed modules in addition to Drupal core.

Despite having worked on the book for well over a year, it's hard to believe it's really here. Today I received a newsletter from O'Reilly containing my biography for the book. The book is already available through O'Reilly's excellent Safari service. I haven't received my physical copies yet, but I guess it's already undeniable that the book really is finished and one more life goal accomplished.

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The degree to which privacy is protected on the web is determined not only by the policies and practices of a particular site. In a web application, it also depends on the software the site is built on.

Drupal excels at enabling individuals to share information. How strong is Drupal's corresponding support for protecting personal information and privacy? To answer this question, we'll look at display of private information, IP address logging, cookie use, and users' control over their own data.

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It has been presented to me in forum discussions on drupal that people are experiencing issues with their user's sessions on their drupal sites in Safari. Most experience the same issue:  read more »

• A user logs in, tries to create content and are kicked / logged out and taken to the homepage

The Marriott hotel has extended our group rate until Thursday, December 4th! If you haven't yet booked your room, do it now! Call the Marriott at 1.888.364.1200 and use the group code "LTCLTCA" to get the discount rate of $149/night.

The Marriott is where the event is happening and where all of the speakers and most of the attendees will be staying. They've got several restaurants and a big common-area in the lobby and this will be a great opportunity to connect with speakers and other attendees, makes some friends, rub some elbows, and exchange some business cards.

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Bringing you another set of 7 mainstream/notable websites that are powered by the Drupal open source content management system! Let this give you confidence in Drupal for your own website. If these people trust the Drupal CMS for their mainstream websites than surely the rest of us can trust it for our own websites. Here’s the list:

1. Spread Thunderbird - the popular Mozilla Thunderbird email application. Very similar to the Spreadfirefox.com site that is using Drupal as well.

2. The Onion - a massive news site covering everything from Politics to Sports. One of the more popular and well established online news sites on the web.

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Workhabit customer YourSphere was featured recently in a case study on Drupal.org.

The case study shows how YourSphere is building a secure, safe, and private social network just for teens. They describe how things are built, going into some good detail on the profiles and how the developers made it easy for non-expert admins to add content.

There’s a particularly nice mention of WorkHabit’s scalable Drupal hosting platform, Elastic 2.  read more »

Nice menus is a great little module for creating dropdown and flyout menus in your Drupal site. My time to be a good maintainer for it varies wildly so it often sits dormant for long periods. Last week, during the Thanksgiving holiday, I dove back into the issue queue and after fixing a few bugs I spent most of my time playing with new features. The main things that I am excited about are things that will hopefully make version 2 of Nice menus, well, a little nicer.

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The new look GeeksAndGod.com is here. After several weeks of redesign and dealing with design debt, that was built up from drupal 4.7, the new site is live and running drupal 6.

The image below is what the screen would look like for a logged in user. There are 4 blocks at the bottom giving a snapshot of what's going on in the community. Anonymous users see a slightly different look where the podcast is front and center and the blocks at the bottom are replaced with information about the site.

Some of the new features include reviews, tutorials, JavaScript goodness, and we imported thousands of forum posts and hundreds of users from Christian-Web-Masters.com.

At this point I won't dive into the details of how we built the site. The next podcast episode is going to dive into the technicalities.

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Ironic how the world can change so quickly.  Yesterday, the CIO of my organization began enforcing the use of anti-virus software on all of our Linux clients and servers.  Today, I read that Apple is telling its Mac users to purchase anti-virus software.  Something nasty is brewing out there.

Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.

Initial reports by Brian Krebbs, Security Fix and The Register.