Planet Drupal

Doug Green, maintainer of the Coder Module, get all the praise this morning. On a quick vacation, I decided it was time to finally upgrade the two small modules that I maintain. I haven't used Coder in a while (though I will be using it much more now), but I knew that it had a helper for upgrading D5 => D6. And what a breeze Coder made upgrading my modules.

read more

My visit to DrupalCamp Alberta was a huge amount of fun and an amazing opportunity to speak to other Drupal users based in and around the Canadian Rockies. In my previous post, I talked about the presentation I gave and the work Trellon is doing on the Drupal Services module.

The Services module allows Drupal developers to easily build out web services on their sites and is an important component for web portals that offer access to content through an API. It fits nicely into a web strategy where widgets, mashups, and other applications can pull information from a Drupal site without needing to scrape HTML. There are some important considerations for sites using web services which are addressed through a number of configuration options that are part of the module.

Security configuration

read more

Last month we were commissioned to develop rather quickly a community website where potential applicants to the Knight News Challenge could workshop their applications, get feedback from mentors and peers, and – hopefully – improve their chances of winning some of the $5 million being granted this year by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
<!--break-->
We designed and developed the site in 2 weeks, from wireframes to beta deployment. The Garage is running Drupal 5, with some customized implementation of the Organic Groups modules. We love working on rapid timetables; it's something we do quite a bit of.

Anyway, here is the video announcement by Kristen Taylor, Online Community Manager for the Knight Foundation – video courtesy of DotSub:

If you are multilingual, you can help get the word out. On the Knight blog, Kristen writes:

read more

Recently, Google launched Google Insights. Like with Google Trends, you can just type in a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as well as the top related and rising searches. You’ll also have the ability to compare search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories (commonly referred to as verticals), geographic regions, or specific time ranges. Great for marketing people.

Below are some examples specific to Drupal ...

The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

read more

Recently, NTEN (the Nonprofit Technology Network) released their 2008 Content Management Systems Satisfaction Report evaluating the most commonly used systems at small and medium sized organizations.

The CMS systems were evaluated in five categories: Quality, Support, Delivers on Promises, Usability and Value. Drupal and Joomla! both scored the highest marks, yet Drupal had nearly twice the number of responses than the latter.

Open source systems scored generally higher than commercial systems and custom systems were rated near the bottom of the pack.

Kieran posted a nice summary of the report results at Drupal.org.

The report is available to members of NTEN for free and to non-members at a discount rate. (CivicActions is a proud member of NTEN!)

read more

Earlier tonight, I was commenting on a friend's blog. He was asking about web game programming, and the challenges of Flash vs. Java. For whatever reason, the first thing that came to mind was OpenLaszlo, which some fellow Drupal colleagues have been very big on lately, so I left a quick note to that effect despite, to be honest, not knowing much about the subject.

Wait, colleagues? It took me a moment to realize that I had indeed just written "colleagues", because I've never actually worked with the people in question.

read more

So I'm working on a project now where nodes are mass-imported from a third party. By default, these nodes are unpublished until the delegated party can add additional information that the import can't capture. We publish the node when it's through being reviewed and updated.

To be clear, the workflow looks like:
1) Import nodes (CCK type: "Item"), default status is Unpublished.
2) User with "Reviewer" role looks at the queue of Items that needs reviewed
3) Reviewer reviews Item nodes, then sets them as Published.

Here's the problem though:

read more

The patch for an improved aggregator for Drupal 7 is now available on Drupal.org #236237. This code is result of Aron Novak's Google Summer of Code project and it is available as a Drupal project with regular patches against Drupal HEAD #236237. The patch has been out for a couple of weeks, so it's high time to talk about what improvements it aims to bring to Drupal core.

Before I dive into the details though, I'd like to point out that several people requested to break the patch into smaller pieces as it is rather big and touches on more than one functionality of the aggregator. We yet have to work on this, however I do think that there is a value in presenting the proposed improvements as a whole. So here we go.

There are four major differences in comparison to the existing aggregator:

read more

pingVision is currently hiring for the position of intermediate-to-advanced level Information Architect for web applications. We are looking for a seasoned Information Architect with experience with User Interface and web design to work with our creative team on frequent projects for world-class clients such as BMW, the Knight Foundation, Stanford University and Popular Science.

We're looking for a detail-oriented person interested in joining our <?php print l("our growing design and development team","about/people"); ?> for work on a wide variety of web and media projects.

We are looking for someone in or willing to relocate to the greater Boulder/Denver area. Sorry, telecommuting is not an option. This is a full-time position.

I submitted a patch to the activitystream module to allow it to hook into views properly. In this case the patch allows you to specify a specific source type (e.g. Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, etc.) and display only that source in a view.

This is particularly useful for things like showing your twitter status in a block ala facebook.

Hopefully it comes in handy.

You can review the patch here.

In case you haven't seen it yet, a tentative schedule for the upcoming Drupalcon is out today: http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/program/schedule. I'm excited to see all the great sessions we'll have and looking forward to seeing those drupal.org usernames revealed again as walking, talking people. Thanks to everyone who voted for my session proposals - both have been accepted and scheduled for the main room:

1. Drupal 6 menu system - architecture, do, don't and tricks (together with chx)
2. Page serving and rendering (XHTML/XML/JSON, etc.) - now and Drupal 7

read more

Drupal's coding conventions make it easier to hook into system behavior, but they also result in a lot of repetitive typing. For example, you can run code when upgrading a module by putting the code in a function named modulename_update_N() in your module's install file. I found myself scrolling up and copy-pasting stuff too many times, so I decided to automate it instead.

I've been using yasnippet for my Emacs templates. All I needed to do to automate that little update bit was to write some code that figured out what the next update number should be. Here's the snippet file I've just added (~/elisp/snippets/php-mode/drupal-mode/_update):

function `(sacha/drupal-module-name)`_update_`(sacha/drupal-module-update-number)`() { $ret = array(); $0 $ret[] = array( 'success' => true, 'query' => '$1', ); return $ret; }

The relevant functions from my ~/.emacs:

read more

We already knew Jonathan's work on 247 Townhall would turn heads, but we're still excited to announce that the project has appeared on Drupal's "Success Stories" page with a full-page description. Among the featured successes of 247 Townhall's launch is Jonathan's video upload module, which you can read about here.

We urge you to visit 247 Townhall and the Drupal node yourself, but we've gathered a few highlights anyway:

• Site visitors can maintain custom lists of their favorite content.
• Avatar images are automatically resized and given rounded corners and orange borders.
• Site contributers can submit custom background images for article postings.
• Site contributers can submit videos on node/add and node/edit forms that are automatically, and silently, uploaded directly to youTube for processing and display.
• Site administrators can aggregate interesting user-generated content into a "series" or online publication.

Thank you for reading.

Media Mover is a rich media batch processing engine that was initially developed several of CivicActions' clients. Currently deployed on several of our client's sites (most prominently on the Hub and ACLU.tv) Media Mover has served a niche for video content manipulation.

read more

I don't even remember how I ended up on the Akademy site this morning .. but luckily I did.

Akademy takes place in Sint-Katelijne-Waver , ages a go my grandparents lived there to, that's Belgium if you didn't notice yet.

Now the weird thing is that there seems almost no fuzz about it in the Belgian Foss Community , nobody talks about it.
Also on Upcoming.org the event can't be found. :(

Honestly this worries me, why isn't there more talk about a rather big FOSS event in Belgium, don't we care anymore ? Or do we just not care about KDE. (apart from the people organizing the event ?)
There's lots of Drupal, MySQL and Gnome activity going on in our little country but somehow less KDE. Hopefully Akademy changes that.

Sadly I have already a fully booked schedule so I won't be able to actually make it to Mechelen for either days of the conference. Sad because unless we have a conference in Antwerpen some day soon it's probably going the to be the closest FOSS event to home.

I’ve just added the new Auto Run module to Media Mover’s 1.0alpha3 release. This module is a straight forward attempt to bridge the gap between people who need the complex functionality that Media Mover offers and people who need their data to be converted on demand. This module will run specified Media Mover configurations on [...]

In addition to all of the work being done on the SMS Framework, we have also started researching how to quickly create our own two-way SMS gateway for sending and receiving SMS messages. It is a proof of concept based on needs we are hearing from development agencies. Our solution is based around gnokii, an open source project that can be used to control the various functions of any mobile phone it supports. gnokii sends and receives SMS text messages over a USB or Bluetooth connection with the phone. 

In our setup we’re using a Nokia 6102i mobile phone, gnokii 0.6.8 (installed using Macports) and a MacBook Pro with Bluetooth.

A daemon, written in Python, manages the process of sending and receiving messages and a Drupal module acts as the end point on the Drupal side. The daemon periodically checks the phone for incoming messages and the server for outgoing messages. If a message is found it is processed and passed to the other side.

read more

We are excited to announce that the initial Alpha release of 2.1 is now available for download, AND to try out on our sandbox site. We're really excited about all the cool new features and improvements. Check out Dave's last blog for some highlights... or the 2.1 Roadmap for a more complete listing.

We strongly encourage folks to download and test the alpha release and help improve the final product. Upgrading to 2.1 requires a simultaneous upgrade of Drupal to 6.3, and we need test-drivers who can help us iron out any bleeps or burps that we haven't discovered in our own testing. You can contribute significantly to the project by testing the upgrade process against a copy of your 2.0 data, as well as running your regular tasks on an upgraded site.

 

read more

Seems like my old spam module and Mollom were dissagreeing on comment spams.

Comment's that I had already approved were still being deleted by the spam module during it's cron run.

spam_delete_comment: deleted comment "openSUSEEE"

I just noticed this yesterday with 2-3 comments that disappeared.
So the old Spam module is gone.. it's just Mollom and Moderation now ..
If one of your comments is gone , please post it again :)

While I was away on vacation last week, Drupaltherapy.com got hosed by the shared hosting provider I've grown to hate. Days later I was informed that "due to dozens of database queries per second for several hours", all account services were suspended. Dozens of queries is exactly what a database should do, but apparently not for my twitchy host.

This reinforces one of my workshop lessons about shared web hosting services, the you-get-what-you-pay-for lesson. I've configured and managed Drupal in environments from shared to dedicated and the difference in price is reflected most brightly by the level of response and accountability. Dollar per pound, customers shouldn't really expect top levels of service for $4.99/mo.

There are good tips out there on reducing resource consumption, from caching and CSS aggregating as told by John Forsythe to optimizing your custom database queries especially in views.

But nothing can prepare you for a cheapo host pulling the plug and heading home for the weekend. No sites and no email, I was inches from a nice cliff I could have thrown myself from (pictured above). Drupaltherapy is now hosted by a new company and shouldn't be winking out any time soon.

read more