Planet Drupal
Nice menus getting nicer
New Look Geeks and God.com
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.
The new G&G website was created by Innovating Tomorrow and Mustardseed Media.
Apple recommends anti-virus software for the Mac
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.
Fields in Drupal core code Sprint
Good news! During the week of December 15, we're organizing a 5-day Fields in Drupal core code sprint at Acquia! The goal is to get CCK functionality into Drupal 7.
So far, Karen, Yves and Barry have signed up -- Karen and Yves are the main CCK maintainers, and Barry has done a lot of work on CCK as well.
To help us fund the sprint, please consider making a donation using the ChipIn widget on this page. We need money for airline tickets, hotel rooms, food and transportation. It would also be great to fly in a few additional people with extensive core and CCK experience.
I've tentatively worked out a budget of $7,000 USD, which covers flight, food and hotel costs for at least four people (Karen, Yves, and two additional people). Since Acquia is covering my travel expenses and allowing Barry to participate all week long, that gives us six people working on CCK-fields-in-core for an entire week. Any excess money will be used to add more people, or donated to the Drupal Association.
To guarantee that Yves and Karen can attend, Acquia is funding Yves' and Karen's hotel and airplane tickets if enough money can't be raised through donations. Acquia is also providing working space in our Andover office.
We'll try to allow people to participate in the sprint remotely, and provide a daily update on our progress. If you're interested and available to participate, join the Fields in Core group, enable e-mail notifications, and block time in your calendar between December 15 and December 19. We'll use the Fields in Core group to plan and to let you know how you can contribute and participate.
This sprint could be an important moment in Drupal's history, so we're counting on your help. Please consider making a donation using the ChipIn widget or help us raise funds by spreading the word. Hopefully, fields in core can be this year's Christmas present. Thanks!
Drupal Meetup In Boston: December 2nd @ 6:30
I've gotten bitten by the Drupal bug. I can't help it, but ever since I started working at Acquia, I've become obsessed. The open source software is straightup awesome and even compelled me to switch this blog over from WordPress to Drupal. With that said, I'm pretty excited to be attending my first Drupal meetup in Boston tonight. I've heard great things about the events and recommend going if you're a Drupal user, interested in open source, or looking for a new CMS for your website. If you're a startup, you may consider building your venture off open source to get it up and going fast while saving costs as an "Ultra Light Startup."
Drupal users will be able to present their websites and anyone can give a brief presentation on a topic of their choice, if they choose. We'll go over questions, module demonstrations, share marketing ideas for Drupal, and anything else that you may be interested in. After, the group will continue conversation over dinner. Myself, and a couple other members from Acquia, will be there as well, and will be happy to answer any questions about our services or what we're up to.
The meeting will be hosted by John Eckman, from Optaros (one of Acquia's partners), at 6:30 tonight on the 11th floor at 10 Milk St in Boston, MA.
Fun Fact: Dries Buytaert started Drupal while at school 7 years ago. Startup Blog Cont. »
Modifying CCK fieldgroups with hook_form_alter()
I was writing a module to conditionally hide a fieldset on a CCK node editing form based on whether the user is logged in or not, and for a while I was very puzzled as to why my custom module's implementation of hook_form_alter wasn't seeing any of the fieldsets defined by the CCK fieldgroup module.
I searched Google for the terms 'cck fieldset hook_form_alter', which led me to a helpful tip from Benjamin Melançon:
Tab Dump , Drupal Performance
Have to close some tabs .. what more can I say ..
2 interresting articles about Drupal and MySQL performance tuning
Enjoy
How To: Setting up Drupal's Cron
Even Drupal has to take out the trash and wash it’s windows every once in a while. Ok, that sounds a bit silly, but what I’m talking about are those routine items which need to be carried out on some type of frequency - to keep your Drupal running smoothly.
It’s Drupal’s cron.php script which needs the love. It sits at the same level as the index.php script and it takes care of some of the “behind the scenes” stuff. It’s an important aspect to your site and knowing how to configure and set this up is what this video is all about.
From covering a normal Cron setup (according to drupal.org) and using Poormanscron, as well as discussing Multisite cron, of which my current favorite is a simple shell script, this video covers as much as it can to help you gain a full understanding.
There are all kinds of other tips and tricks related to setting up cron, but essentially, you simply need to know that cron.php must be accessed on some type of frequency.
Comment Aggregation: Tightly Integrating Third Party Social Networks with Your Site
For the Knight Pulse website we recently built, we came up with a simple way of embedding video and comments from Vimeo in a blog post. Here's how simple it is. Just copy and paste the URL of the video to the node form, submit it, and you're done.
Watch this screencast to take a look at the UI:
This feature is of great value because it creates a bridge between each video's two presences - the conversations happening on Knight Pulse and the conversations on Vimeo. In this post, I'll show you how we built the feature and how you can do it yourself for Vimeo and also other social networks like Flickr, YouTube, and, with a little bit of homework, almost any other site.
S-Files: Adding Basic Search Fields and Filters to Views
Tech Support Case Studies
Being that Views is both a very popular module and included in Acquia Drupal, we get a lot of questions regarding how to configure and customize views in various ways. One thing that has come up a few times is a customer wanting to add custom searching or filters to their views.
A quick&dirty taxonomy based css loader
I had to implement a multiple colored theme for one of our sites. The site is a small company site with few static pages and a gallery. I know that there are several modules that can implement this feature, but I didn't want to install extra modules. So I added following few lines to the template.php file from my zen-based theme:
presenting "extra RSS fields" a module that outputs CCK fields in RSS feeds
Before I got totally swamped in the preparation of Drupalcon Szeged, I was playing with a module that uses a nodeAPI implementation for extra RSS fields, similar to Ian Ward's "views rss extra maker" in the developmentSEED sandbox. This Monday I finally committed it.
The module leverages the Views 1.0 field interface to give users control over the fields that will be displayed. It needs a minor patch to views_RSS (to add the $view variable when invoking the nodeAPI) to be able to do it's thing (nested tags, only specified fields). It also supports CCK fields with multiple values.
The Best Ad Module for Drupal
In developing an affiliate marketing website with Drupal recently, I was in need of an Advertisement module where I could control advertisement in different sections of the site, randomly display with multiple ads, and to view statistics on impressions and clicks as well as a few other things. I found the module I was looking for called simply the Advertisement Module for Drupal.
The ad module is a powerful advertising system for Drupal-powered websites. It supports the random display and tracking of graphical (banner) and text ads. Ads can easily be displayed in themes, blocks, or embedded in site content. The module records comprehensive statistics about when and how often ads are viewed and clicked, including a plug-in module for generating graphical time-based reports. Ads can be assigned to multiple owners, each of which can be assigned their own set of permissions. Installation is simple by design. An API is provided allowing the development of additional
functionality and integration with other Drupal modules.
Features Include:
- auto-generated ad blocks supporting a configurable number of ads
- automatically or manually embed ads into site content
- collection of comprehensive statistics allowing time-based reporting and analysis
- tracking of when and where ads are clicked, by which user and which IP
- advertisements can have multiple owners
- granular per-advertisement/per-owner permissions system
- activation/expiration scheduling based on time, clicks or views
- an ad_image plug-in for image (aka banner) ads
- an ad_text plug-in for simple text ads
- an ad_report plug-in for basic graphical reports
- an ad_notify plug-in for scheduling automatic email notifications
- an ad_remote plug-in for hosting ads on remote (non-Drupal) websites
- geotargeting is provided through the Ad GeoIP project
- an administrative statistics overview page
- support for any number of configurable ad groups, utilizing Drupal’s taxonomy (category) subsystem
- display ads based on node ids (nids), or taxonomy terms (categories)
- file-based caching for improved performance
- memcache-based caching for improved performance
- support for external caching methods
- MySQL and PostgreSQL support
I highly recommend using this module if you are planning on serving many graphical and text ads on your site. It’s way too easy to install and configure and use. Just make sure to read all documentation when you run into any snags and you should be just fine! There is currently a working version of this Module for Drupal versions 4 and 5, but not yet for version 6.
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FOSDEM devroom for drupal confirmed
Our Devroom request for FOSDEM2009 has just been confirmed so we’ll have a mini Drupal track, just like last year.
Mark your calendar: Sunday Feb 8, 2009 – Brussels – FOSDEM Drupal Devroom
The acceptance of our proposal is clear sign of the confidence the FOSS universe has in Drupal, and the importance that is attributed to both the Drupal project and the surrounding community.
Thanks FOSDEM crew!
NHL using Drupal
Drupal CDN & Static File Server - The Amazon S3 Way
If you build quality sites that attract a large number of visitors and interaction there eventually will come a point when you have to start looking for ways to offload your files and bring down your server overhead. I have been looking into the CDN issue off and on for the past 6 months. Recently I decided it was time to get something dialed in and move forward. I wanted something that required the least number of hacks and was easy and scalable. This post isn't meant to be an end all to Drupal and CDNs, but rather just some insight into the way I have tackled this issue for the time being.
Drupal Developer Room at Fosdem2009
We just got confirmation that Drupal has a DevRoom at Fosdem on Sunday February 8, 2009.
If you live somewhere in Europe (at least if it's in the 1000km area around Brussels), make sure to block this weekend in your agenda. Not only for the Drupal DevRoom on Sunday, but also to meet the other 4000 people and tens of intresting Open Source projects at the conference.
As posted a few weeks ago, Drupal has a history at Fosdem; so let's make this one another one to remember...
We will use the Fosdem groups at g.d.o. to discuss the presentations, and practical stuff like transportation, and stuff to do on Saturday or Friday night.
Northern Virginia Drupal December Meetup
Hope to see you this Wednesday, December 3rd for the Northern Virginia Drupal Meetup at 6:30 PM. We’ve moved the venue to Ireland Four Courts which is conveniently located in courthouse on the orange line. We’ll be in the back room.
This month, we will talk about scaling Drupal using Amazon Web Services.
Eric Johnson of The Case Foundation and Frank Febbraro of Phase2 Technology will lead us through their experience with: types of services, the providers, planning, preparing your Drupal site, preparing the AWS environment, writing scripts, testing and lessons learned.
Using Acquia Drupal as an image processor?
Catching up on some blog reading today I picked up on a thread Dave Winer's been writing about. He's using ImageMagick to resize images and produce thumbnails. Throughout the thread I kept thinking this sounds a lot like a standalone version of the Drupal imagecache module. Perhaps, I thought, the answer could be setting up a Drupal site to do the conversion. Nah that's too much I said to myself.
However, the more I thought about it the more sense it made. Then I got to today's post where Winer mentions a small web server for doing the work. "I'm still bugged that: 1. It seems slower than it should be. 2. A window flashes every time it creates a thumbnail," Winer says in the post. OK this is the prefect situation for building a one-off clone of imagecache. The next paragraph says, however, that he doesn't want to build it in PHP as it's another language to pick up.
While heating up some naan for my lunch the plan came together. Build a small website using Acquia Drupal and have imagecache do the work for you. The beauty of the solution is that it doesn't take learning PHP. It is a PHP-based solution of course, but one with no coding necessary. So why use Acquia Drupal specifically? It has a couple of advantages in having the necessary modules already bundled with it. The modules are all available on Drupal.org but for somebody who hasn't setup a Drupal site before having them all together is handy. There's also a good Getting Started guide that makes it easy for users to get a site setup.
Drupal in Education and E-Learning Now Available
Drupal for Education and E-Learning is now available from Packt Publishing. This book covers Drupal 6, and describes how to build a community site to support teaching and learning. This book is designed for people new to Drupal, with no prior development experience. The hands-on, step-by-step instructions guide you through installing Drupal, configuring contributed modules and themes, and working with some of Drupal’s most useful and powerful modules, including CCK, Views, and Organic Groups. The book also covers site maintenance, upgrades, and backups – these essential steps, while not as fun as site building, are essential for keeping your site and data secure.
Additionally, the book covers some of the basics of when to use different types of resources in the classroom. Frequently, people talk about incorporating video, or audio, or social bookmarks, etc, into the classroom, but they never discuss effective uses of these tools. While this book is not exhaustive in these discussions, I attempted to create some context around creative and effective use of the social web in a learning environment.
On a related note, we have also decided to be more organized and systematic with regards to putting out occasional tutorials. They will be collected under the tutorials tag, and can be seen at http://funnymonkey.com/tutorials (or subscribed to via rss).
For people new to Drupal, Drupal in Education and E-Learning includes details on:
- Drupal terminology;
- User creation;
- Role based access control;
- Installing modules and themes;
- Using taxonomy to categorize posts
- Backing up and upgrading your site.
For more experienced Drupallers, the book covers:
- Using CCK to extend content types -- instructions cover sharing media, images, links, text, and files;
- An overview of Views 2, including adding new views, using the new access control mechanisms of Views 2, configuring multiple displays from a single view, and cloning and modifying existing views;
- An overview of Organic Groups, including instructions on how to use groups to support informal and formal learning;
- Extending user profiles to support connections between users;
Using the menu and block system to simplify and streamline the navigation of your site.
For more specifics on information covered in this book, the Table of Contents gives a solid overview.
