Drupal News
Adaptivethemes: Field Type Suggestions in Drupal 7
Today I finally got around to testing out the new field suggestions in Drupal 7. If you’re not familiar with the standard suggestions in short you can either use field templates or override theme_field using a naming convention not unlike we do with preprocess functions. What struck me as kind of odd was the lack suggestions for field types—maybe there’s a very good reason for this such as performance, I don’t know, but I thought it might be interesting to see if I could use them, if I wanted to.
Fusion Drupal Themes: New faces at TNT
In all our recent excitement, I have neglected to introduce the two newest members of the TopNotchThemes family!
Stacy WrayStacy joined us a few months ago to provide some much needed assistance with themer-herding, customer support, bookkeeping, and generally supporting our team. She’s the friendly face you’ll talk to first if you have any questions about our themes. Stacy is also involved with the rebirth of the Drupal Dojo/Kata, and has been upping her Drupal nerd cred on a daily basis.
Sheena Donnelly
Dave Cohen: Drupal for Facebook at SF DUG
I had the opportunity to present my project Drupal for Facebook, at the San Francisco Drupal Users Group.
Drupal for Facebook let's you build Facebook Apps with Drupal. These apps allow users to register on your site using their facebook password. Or, place your content within facebook.com. It's flexible, lets you build features the way you're used to (The Drupal Way), and can give your sites social features that would otherwise be impossible.
Big thanks to Conrad for providing the video. And to John for inviting me to speak, and everyone at Parisoma for hosting.
Boombatower Development: Upgrading theme() calls with Coder Upgrade
A lot of effort has been poured into the upgrade routines for Coder Upgrade as evidenced by the green check marks on this page. (A side note: so far, duellj is the only person to show up for the upgrade barn raising and much thanks to Jon is due. If you are up for a challenge, help is still welcomed and needed to write and/or test routines.)
An interesting example of an upgrade routine is the theme() function call change. This upgrade involves "array-itizing" the variable parameters. For example, this:
<?php
theme('user_list', $users, $title);
?>
becomes in D7:
<?php
theme('user_list', array('users' => $users, 'title' => $title));
?>
The twist involves finding the keys for the associative array of variables.
Sparing the details, Coder Upgrade will insert the proper keys for any theme defined in D7 core files (includes and modules directories) as well as themes defined by the module being upgraded.
CommonPlaces e-Solutions: New White Paper – “When to Use a Multi-Site Architecture”
Are you planning to build multiple websites for your business? Before you do, read out free, 9-page white paper, “When to Use a Multi-Site Architecture,” to learn more about the significant savings that multi-site can deliver. If your goals require multiple websites, a multi-site solution could cut your development and maintenance costs in half.
Here’s an excerpt from the white paper:
“More often than not, one website can deliver everything an organization needs, and help them achieve all of their goals.
In some cases, however, your goals may necessitate multiple, related websites. Perhaps you want to build upon the success of your resource site for plumbers, and offer one for electricians as well. Maybe you want to create an online university, separate from your main site, and offer courses to your current users. Or maybe you want to customize multiple online stores for different segments of your customer base, but offer many of the same products to them.
Lullabot: Drupal Voices 79: Daniel Kudwien and his many Drupal development contributions
Daniel Kudwien (aka sun on drupal.org and tha_sun on IRC) of Unleashed Mind is a prolific Drupal contributed module author, but also Drupal core developer.
He discusses some of the well-known modules that he helped author and maintain, such as WYSIWYG, Admininstration Menu, Image Assist, Inline, and Demonstration Site.
He's taken it upon himself to make sure a lot of the Drupal 7 APIs have been standardized and cleaned up as much as possible, and also rallied a lot of help on tackling Drupal's oldest standing task of "Node 8," which is allowing users to cancel their own accounts. Sun also gave a heroic effort on helping on many of the different exception patches during the code slush period, and fellow developer chx commenting that he's never seen anyone sprint for Drupal.
Lullabot: Drupal Voices 79: Daniel Kudwien and his many Drupal development contributions
Daniel Kudwien (aka sun on drupal.org and tha_sun on IRC) of Unleashed Mind is a prolific Drupal contributed module author, but also Drupal core developer.
He discusses some of the well-known modules that he helped author and maintain, such as WYSIWYG, Admininstration Menu, Image Assist, Inline, and Demonstration Site.
He's taken it upon himself to make sure a lot of the Drupal 7 APIs have been standardized and cleaned up as much as possible, and also rallied a lot of help on tackling Drupal's oldest standing task of "Node 8," which is allowing users to cancel their own accounts. Sun also gave a heroic effort on helping on many of the different exception patches during the code slush period, and fellow developer chx commenting that he's never seen anyone sprint for Drupal.
Kristof De Jaeger: Contextual links backport - more or less
Drupal 7 now comes with the contextual module which makes it very easy to edit your site as there are inline action links available on your content, blocks and so on. There are a few modules out there available for D6 - block edit and admin:hover come to mind - which offer the same functionality but are different when it comes to interface and/or extendability.
We decided to write a new module from scratch with the UI in mind of the D7 version, also taking care of performance and the need for easy extendability including hooks (duh) and static actions which allows us to have a static variable during the page request which can collect stuff from all over the place. You can test it out at http://demo.customsource.be/content/home with demo/demo. Surf to the 'articles' page which has contextual links for views, nodes & blocks.
What happens next ?
Development Seed: Drush 3.0: More Powerful, Flexible, and Magical
Over the last few years Drush has matured significantly and has seen an incredible uptake in usage. It's become indispensable in the day to day workflow of innumerable Drupal users and has been accepted with open arms by contributed module developers who are finding new and wonderful functionality to expose via its clear command line interface.
What not many people realize is that beneath this simple command line API beats the heart of a far more flexible and powerful beast. Drush was written with re-use and scriptability in mind, with this entire concept deeply ingrained in its design, and this is a large part of what gives it its power and flexibility. This will be even more apparent in Drush 3.0.
Below is a rundown of some useful things you'll be able to do with Drush 3.0.
Localize.drupal.org: More improvements on the staging site, feedback is still welcome
I've announced our staging site for localize.drupal.org two weeks ago, and some people did take on the opportunity to test out the site and provided valuable feedback. Fixes and improvements are rolled out continually on the site. Since the staging site was set up with a completely revamped user interface to translate text, the following changes made their way onto the staging site:
Dries Buytaert: City of Athens using Drupal
The City of Athens has launched a new Drupal site to serve as its official website, along with a Drupal-based site at http://www.breathtakingathens.com/ that provides visitor and tourism information.
Athens is a large city (3.5 million residents and 6 million tourists each year), with a large tourism base due in part to its role in the 2004 Olympic Games. To support the city's needs, the site includes a large calendar of city events, a comprehensive map-based index of city services and interactive tools that allow citizens to access city resources. The site builds on Drupal's multilingual capabilities to provide information in both Greek and English.
Stella Power: Migrate module: migrating a node's taxonomy terms
One of the issues I encountered when migrating nodes to Drupal, using the migrate module, was that I couldn't associate nodes with more than one taxonomy term. Actually in this example, I'm migrating content from one Drupal database to another, so I'm going to assume everyone is already familiar with the database structure, specifically the node and term_node tables.
When I first started using the migrate module, I ran into a similar problem with migrating a user's roles. It's not possible to just create a Views relationship (aka LEFT JOIN) between the node and term_node tables using the node id. This will produce one row for each node and taxonomy combination, but the migrate module is only able to handle data sets that contain one row for each entity. With the above solution, I have more than one row for each node, which causes the migrate module to import the same node more than once, causing all sorts of problems.
Like with the user roles example before, we can overcome this by implementing a migrate hook, specifically hook_migrate_prepare_node().
Justin Miller: Drupal module: Advanced Comment Trigger
I have to admit that I've got it pretty good in the website spam department. The Mollom project, started by some of the same folks who started Drupal, uses content analysis to keep spam users from registering accounts on my site, leaving blog & forum comments, and using my site's contact form to spam me via email as well.
The only problem that I've really seen is the rise of spammers who will post blog comments containing text from the blog post itself, almost entirely unchanged, along with one or more links to their sites. Content-based analysis is of no use here, since the majority of the comment is actual text that I would want on my site -- after all, I blogged it!
Until now, I've been following all blog comments to my site via built-in RSS feeds, noticing spam comments some time after they were posted, and going back and deleting them. Drupal allows for comment moderation, but I want comments to go out there right away.
Lullabot: Which Simpsons character best represents the Drupal community?
In preparation for the Bringing it All Back Home: CMS Communities panel at SXSW, which I'll be speaking at on Saturday, I posed the following question on Twitter and in #drupal:
Which Simpsons character best represents the #Drupal community and why?
And the winner, in terms of number of responses, was...
- Thinks she has all the answers to save the world but is so pathetically naive she never will. Yet you love her anyway. - TheRealCrell
- Underestimated, Intelligent, resourceful. With a wonderful singing voice. - bear_feet
- She is open minded and usually diplomatic :) - JCL324
- Logical, but not so popular. - DaftNinja
And here were the others. Feel free to comment too with your own. :)
Lullabot: Which Simpsons character best represents the Drupal community?
In preparation for the Bringing it All Back Home: CMS Communities panel at SXSW, which I'll be speaking at on Saturday, I posed the following question on Twitter and in #drupal:
Which Simpsons character best represents the #Drupal community and why?
And the winner, in terms of number of responses, was...
- Thinks she has all the answers to save the world but is so pathetically naive she never will. Yet you love her anyway. - TheRealCrell
- Underestimated, Intelligent, resourceful. With a wonderful singing voice. - bear_feet
- She is open minded and usually diplomatic :) - JCL324
- Logical, but not so popular. - DaftNinja
And here were the others. Feel free to comment too with your own. :)
Lullabot: Customizable Header Images for Your Drupal Theme
The dark days of Drupal theming are history. Today, it's pretty easy to find a slick design for your site, and if you need to build one from scratch there are great training tools to make the process painless. (Shameless plug: Lullabot's Theming Basics and Advanced Theming DVDs are a great resource!)
What's still relatively uncommon, though, is support for user-friendly customization by non-designers. Drupal 5 shipped with the re-colorable Garland theme, and a handful of themes support the same feature via Color module. The Nitobe theme offers a choice of header images; Development Seed's Singular theme lets administrators upload a custom background image for a site; and TopNotchThemes' Fusion theme allows administrators to choose fonts and switch from fixed-width to liquid layout using a settings screen.
Lullabot: Customizable Header Images for Your Drupal Theme
The dark days of Drupal theming are history. Today, it's pretty easy to find a slick design for your site, and if you need to build one from scratch there are great training tools to make the process painless. (Shameless plug: Lullabot's Theming Basics and Advanced Theming DVDs are a great resource!)
What's still relatively uncommon, though, is support for user-friendly customization by non-designers. Drupal 5 shipped with the re-colorable Garland theme, and a handful of themes support the same feature via Color module. The Nitobe theme offers a choice of header images; Development Seed's Singular theme lets administrators upload a custom background image for a site; and TopNotchThemes' Fusion theme allows administrators to choose fonts and switch from fixed-width to liquid layout using a settings screen.
Lullabot: Drupal Voices 78: Wolfgang Ziegler on the Rules Module
Wolfgang Ziegler (aka "fago") talks about the Rules module, and how it can be used by non-programmers to set up a series of events that are executed after certain conditional triggers happen. Fago claims that this is a more robust solution that Drupal's core trigger module functionality.
The Rules module in Drupal 6 is an evolution from the Workflow-NG module in Drupal 5, but renamed to reflect that it can do much more than just workflow.
There was also a Summer of Code project by klausi that integrated into the Rules package as the Rules Forms module.
Fago also talks about the future of Rules and how he plans on improving the APIs so that it's more extensible to add in loops and new features, and to have Features module integration with rules so that it's possible to and re-use rules.
Lullabot: Drupal Voices 78: Wolfgang Ziegler on the Rules Module
Wolfgang Ziegler (aka "fago") talks about the Rules module, and how it can be used by non-programmers to set up a series of events that are executed after certain conditional triggers happen. Fago claims that this is a more robust solution that Drupal's core trigger module functionality.
The Rules module in Drupal 6 is an evolution from the Workflow-NG module in Drupal 5, but renamed to reflect that it can do much more than just workflow.
There was also a Summer of Code project by klausi that integrated into the Rules package as the Rules Forms module.
Fago also talks about the future of Rules and how he plans on improving the APIs so that it's more extensible to add in loops and new features, and to have Features module integration with rules so that it's possible to and re-use rules.
Drupalcon SF 2010: Training classes at DrupalCon San Francisco
You still have a week before you can personalize your conference schedule, but the time to sign up for one of the DrupalCon pre-conference events is now. This year, we have added all-day trainings to the already robust DrupalCon offerings.
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