drupal.com.au

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.

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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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.

We've launched the Drupal.org redesign theme on localize.drupal.org about six weeks ago, and the reception was great. While other subsites like api.drupal.org are also in the process to migrate to this theme, we could pioneer some fixes and get them into production. We keep tweaking the theme on this site and get fixes in based on your feedback.

Some great feature additions landed since the last update. The most requested new feature is that you can now export all outstanding suggestions with translations. In case of multiple outstanding suggestions for any one string, the suggestions will be in comments. In case of single suggestions, the export uses Gettext's fuzzy facility and just marks the string as "not ready". Look for this option on the language export screen.

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Nathaniel Catchpole (aka catch) talks about some of the performance-related patches that he has been focusing on for Drupal 7. When Dries gave his State of Drupal keynote address in DrupalCon San Francisco, he presented the Top 20 Drupal 7 core patch contributors and catch was at the top of the list with over 337 patches that he was involved with by that point. He notes that a lot of his patches were a series of smaller performance-related patches that he discovered by using profiling tools such as XHProf and XDebug. He talks about some of the performance changes that got into Drupal 7, as well as how he's been able to work on Drupal 7 core through his job at Examiner.com.

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This year in my keynote at DrupalCon San Francisco, I mentioned that the elephants are coming. Well, earlier this week Capgemini, one of the world's foremost consulting providers with 95,000 employees, announced a new service, Capgemini Immediate. I'm pleased to say that they're using Drupal as a foundational technology for their new Immediate platform.

Capgemini Immediate is an offering which helps organizations to build and run on-line services. It consists of a number of preferred technologies (i.e., Drupal, MySQL, Salesforce, Lithium, etc.), best practices, and an ecosystem of preferred partners of which Acquia is part.

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With entities Drupal took a huge step forward in providing conceptual clarity in how it deals with things like users, comments, taxonomy terms and nodes.

I believe there is one more step to take to bring even more clarity that will hopefully be possible in Drupal 8. This is the content of my Core Developer Summit lightning talk- hopefully it is not completely off the mark.

With entities Drupal took a huge step forward in providing conceptual clarity in how it deals with things like users, comments, taxonomy terms and nodes.

I believe there is one more step to take to bring even more clarity that will hopefully be possible in Drupal 8 (or 9!). This is the content of my Core Developer Summit lightning talk- hopefully it is not completely off the mark.

It goes something like this:

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Compared to Tattler, one of the weaknesses of Managing News is the lack of topic monitoring - where a user inputs a keyword phrase representing a topic and the system takes care of tracking this topic across pre-selected RSS sources.

Soon after we started using Managing News, this requirement came up.

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Mike Carper (aka mikeytown2) talks about the Boost module, which a lightweight performance enhancement for small-scale sites that don't have a lot of dynamic content. After adding some apache rules to the .htaccess file, then Boost will translate Drupal pages into static HTML files and serve those directly instead of going through PHP and MySQL. Carper talks about some of the other caching configuration options, and says that this module is perfect for sites on shared hosting that are looking for a performance boost. He says that Boost can actually make your site slower in some cases where you have a lot of content that is frequently updated. In those cases, Varnish would probably be a better solution, but the Boost module is intended to be a quick and easy solution for smaller websites looking for better performance.

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Mike Carper (aka mikeytown2) talks about the Boost module, which a lightweight performance enhancement for small-scale sites that don't have a lot of dynamic content. After adding some apache rules to the .htaccess file, then Boost will translate Drupal pages into static HTML files and serve those directly instead of going through PHP and MySQL. Carper talks about some of the other caching configuration options, and says that this module is perfect for sites on shared hosting that are looking for a performance boost. He says that Boost can actually make your site slower in some cases where you have a lot of content that is frequently updated. In those cases, Varnish would probably be a better solution, but the Boost module is intended to be a quick and easy solution for smaller websites looking for better performance.

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This tutorial is sponsored by the Save Joseph campaign, a grassroots effort to find a good friend, stellar artist and all around amazing person a satisfying, creative job in the next 8 days. I know the Drupal community could use this kind of talent. Learn more about the effort at savejoseph.org. If you have any ideas on how I can get the word out about this, let me know!

My use case was that I wanted to be able to use social media icons for menu items so that we could re-arrage, add or remove items directly from the menu management interface:. The result is what you see below:

To use images for menu items in Drupal, the first step is to create an override theme function for theme_menu_item_link() in your theme's template.php file. The idea is to first run your image handling bit to switch out text for images, and then hand it over to the parent theme to do the rest. In my case, I'm using the Zen theme.

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When working in setting up and developing websites (among other things) we often have to choose between getting stuck in and getting stuff done the known way or trying to invest time in coming up with a more automated way or efficient way of doing things. Usually at some point we become aware of whether we made the right choice – and I find that moment is normally accompanied by a certain sinking feeling.

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For the growing universe of developers turning to Drupal as a solution for mission-critical or highly ambitious applications, the question is less and less "can we build it?" and more and more "how do I scale it?"

For those of you considering attending DrupalCon Copenhagen this August looking to answer those kinds of questions, I humbly submit that in addition to immersing yourself in the inspirational slipstream that is the Drupal community, you come a day early — and get your employer or client to find a little extra budget ;) — to attend the Scalability and Performance Workshop on Monday August 23rd:

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Evolving Web had a great time at Drupal Camp NYC last weekend. The camp was a huge success thanks to the excellent turn-out and presentations on exciting topics such as administrative interfaces, Context, and Drupal security. The team of organizers who put the camp together did an amazing job. Here are the slides from our sessions at the camp:

Monitoring Your Drupal Server and Site

An introduction to installing and configuring Nagios as well as extensions and plugins such as logging and graphing and how to setup automated responses to problems.