Drupal

Well I've been back from Drupalcon Szeged for a few days now, although I'm still experiencing a bit of jet lag (asleep by 10pm awake by 7am) which actually isn't all that bad... might try to keep the schedule.  At any rate, Drupalcon was, as always, amazing.  Many new insights to great new features in the pipeline for Drupal, and existing features as well.  I'll touch on just a few that we found while we were there this time.

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Thanks to multiple reports from you, we are aware that a few of the published Drupalcon Szeged 2008 videos are tagged and titled improperly. Our volunteers are back at their regular work schedule, so it takes a little bit more time to figure out and fix the issues. Thanks for your patience, and please keep reporting issues, so we know about any new mislabeled videos you might find.

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Today the third party module Addthis was released. I've had this module installed but did not use it due to a few issues that it had. One of the issues was, it would show up on all of the teasers.

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Suddenly, there are more ways that you can be involved in the drupal.org redesign project - do any of these take your fancy?

Drupal.org Redesign Twitter Group

If you’re on Twitter (or if you’d like to be), follow the Drupal.org Redesign Twitter Group at www.twitter.com/drupalredesign

Once you’re following you can share a message with everyone who’s interested in the redesign project by sending a direct message (start the message with a ‘d’) to the group and everyone who is following the group will receive the tweet.

Something on Drupal.org bothering you? Simple ‘d drupalredesign‘ then tell us what’s bothering you (in 140 char or less!). Your messages will be shared with others on the group.

Drupal.org Redesign Flickr Group

A picture’s worth a thousand words right? That’s probably at least a few dozen Tweets

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Just a quick note to recommended using Google Docs ‘forms’ as a free tool to manage surveys and recruitment. (Choose New, then Form).

We recently wanted to invite people to participate in user research for the drupal.org redesign project - as a part of this we had a short screener we wanted to run people through so that we can target research appropriately in the coming months (and also get some interesting stats - more on that soon!).

Initially I was planning to use Ethnio, as it is purpose built for this, looks pretty and has a kind of nice DHTML ‘not-popup’. I couldn’t get it working though, so then turned to the ever trusty Survey Monkey, but… eh, so ugly! At the last minute I thought of Google Docs and that’s where we stayed.

Super easy to set up, and a nice clean looking interface out of the box, plus no worries being charged for having too many responses. Easy peasy.

We have since almost 900 responses in a just few days and it seems to have held up nicely.

So, if you are looking for a nice tool to use as a screener or a questionnaire and you’re not too fussed about customising the look and feel, I’d heartily recommend Google Docs.

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I spend a good amount of time hanging around the Drupal forums and the question of Drupal site hosting comes up on a fairly regular basis. I'm always amused to see the wide variety of responses where people advocate for the hosting company that they think is the best. What Drupal site builders, especially new ones, need instead of cheerleading is a good explanation of the basic options for hosting a Drupal site.

There are four basic choices that you have when considering hosting for your Drupal site.

1. Shared Hosting
2. Virtual Dedicated Server
3. Dedicated Server
4. Hosted

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting accounts are by far the most popular type of hosting for small website builders. The value present in shared hosting is based on the low cost and general ease of use. You're likely to be paying $20 or less for a shared hosting account per month. Shared hosting also eliminates any responsibility when it comes to managing the web server. 

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There are many reasons why I am tremendously excited about being involved in the redesign project for Drupal.org, not the least of which is that - for a change - I’m actually allowed to talk to you all about the project as we go. Afterall, it’s an open source project - we don’t care so much for confidentiality and Intellectual Property, what we care about here is being open and being part of the community.

Exciting yes? but also somewhat terrifying! What an amazing (and enormous!) community to try to become a part of! As Mark said in our keynote at Drupalcon - it feels like being the new kid at school - will we make friends?!  But one of the things I’m really thinking hard about is how to harness their amazingness in the best way for this project?

Back in the olden days I was a project manager, so I have a great appreciation for an approach that works to limit the amount of feedback that you take into a project - how much, how often etc. Trying to get ‘consolidated’ feedback has traditionally been the goal, so that we can move through the design process as efficiently and calmly as possible.

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There are two main kinds of search engine optimization (SEO)--Off Page and On Page.  Off Page optimization relies on the links you get from others increasing your page rank.

On Page optimization can include:

• Ensuring that you have unique tiles and meta tags for your different pages and that they reflect the content of the page
• Using a robots.txt file to prevent search engine bots from indexing pages you don't want them to index
• Bulleted lists
• Using "static pages" for each of your pages (pathauto will do this nicely and automatically on your Drupal site)
• Creating a sitemap for the search engines to access

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Today, Khalid gave a presentation at the Drupal Users Group of Waterloo Region on Uisng CCK, Views and Panels to build Drupal web sites, with minimal programming. Here are the slides from the presentation, in PDF format.

Ubiquity is a dynamic command and quasi-natural language add-on for Firefox, recently released by Mozilla Labs. It sure is getting ever so popular, so I decided to write two Drupal-related Ubiquity commands in one shot: drupal and drupal-api.

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Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 is an update to David Mercer's two year old book Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites.

Just like David's previous book, this book is geared towards people who are new to Drupal and that have little or no experience in website design, PHP, MySQL or HTML. If you want practical advice on how to get a Drupal site up and running, this book is for you. Unlike David's first Drupal book, this book also caters to the intermediate Drupal user as it talks about Drupal's content construction kit, actions, triggers and even jQuery. Reading this book won't make you a Drupal expert, but it will give you a solid base from which to build.

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We are pleased to announce our presenting sponsor - Acquia!

Drupalistas will know that Acquia is the company that was co-founded by Drupal's founder, Dries Buytaert. Aquia is a new company who is changing the face of Drupal by offering enterprise level products and services.

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Matt Butcher's Learning Drupal 6 module development book an great introduction to begin developing on Drupal. It is not for the die-hard developer, but it looks like a must have for new Drupal developers. Thanks for for putting this book together, Matt!

This story start with a one dollar bill I found the last day during the DrupalCon Szeged 2008.

A dollar, I thought! This must be my lucky day! So I took it with me and decided it was my lucky Dollar. Little did I know.

We took the train from Szeged to Budapest at 10 a clock, 2 hours later we were at the airport and went for a small snack. We had plenty of time, yet - I am not going in details here - it was very frustrating to see the plane leave, to see the gate getting closed, with you at the wrong side of it. It became a very expensive snack, a bit more then a dollar.

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Both Drupal and Dries Buytaert have received many honors recently. As an MIT alum (6-3 '92), however, I'm particularly pleased to see both of them in the TR35: Technology Review's annual list of leading young innovators. Since I'm already 38, this is probably the closest I'll ever come to making that particular list. :-)

The TR35 appears in the current issue of Technology Review magazine (my copy arrived today) as well as online. The easiest way to see the video is at Acquia's web site.

Also staring in the video is the Most Awesome Cat in the Universe and yours truly (who is used to getting second billing to the cat).

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One thing I do while developing Drupal sites is make frequest trips to the "Recent Log Entries" page (admin/reports/dblog) to see what kind of trouble any custom code (or rouge themes and modules) I've added is causing. It is a quick "sanity check" to make sure things are moving in the right direction.

A pet peeve of mine when using a custom theme has always been the "page not found" log entry for the "favicon.ico" file. When using a custom theme (or an overridden favicon.ico file), while Drupal outputs the correct path for the link tag that specifies the file, some browsers still look for the favicon.ico file on the root of the web site. Normally, I "fix" this issue by making a duplicate of the favicon.ico file and placing it on the root of the site.

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A good invitation from Groups.Drupal (Hong Kong), about BarCamp Hong Kong 2008. I will try to share my research founding with Drupal 7.x + Enterprise DB backend, e.g. Oracle, DB2 and MSSQL; some tricky skill for integrate 3rd layout design with Drupal; also hope to gather with Hong Kong Drupaler and discover for our possibility.

Are you living in Hong Kong? Are you using or interesting with Drupal? Do you hope to meet more friends and share your idea? Is time to show up, and I will be there waiting for you. Let's meet on tomorrow :D

Szeged Usability Sprint - a HUGE success.

I wanted to genuinely thank everyone who participated in the usability sprint - particularly Roy for setting it up. The outcome was fantastic!

Together we targeted 4 problematic areas defined by the two usability tests and crafted high-level solutions for each. Item 3 got dismantled due to language barriers, but the others made significant progress. Item 2 resulted in a patch.

1. Night of the disappearing help page (http://groups.drupal.org/node/14387)
2. Where did my content go (http://groups.drupal.org/node/14423)

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Thanks to a comment on by a developer from Mikamai on my other blog, I stumbled across a link to WikiSAP. It’s a social network for members of the SAP community in Italy.

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Last week at DrupalCon Szeged I gave my traditional state of Drupal presentation. The video of the presentation is provided below, and you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 11MB) as well.

The presentation discusses the results of the recent survey that I conducted; the survey ran for 30+ days and collected more than 1300 responses so it should provide a good idea of the community's current thinking. I'll provide more color and details about the survey results in a number of follow-up posts.

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