Planet Drupal

Over the past few days I’ve been posting a lot in the Drupal Groups at Drupal.org about the rationale for some of the design decisions we have taken on the Drupal.org redesign. I thought you might find them interesting, so I’ll copy them over here as well.

In particular we’re talking about why the header is so big, the global navigation is so small, search is so prominent, the ‘dashboard’ tabs are more prominent than the global header and why there is no ‘download now’ link on the homepage.

I can’t guarantee that the rationale is entirely holeproof, however it has definitely been based on paying close attention to what a broad range of people want to do on Drupal.org, making some decisions around how to best prioritise these needs, designing to suit these prioritised needs and then testing to check that the new design does actually support key user tasks.

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DrupalNews will now be regularly produced on Thursdays. Support has been great so far, with more than 1,000 downloads or listens to the podcast! A few more changes in the works as well, so stay tuned.

In this episode, CCK, Organic Groups, and Drupalcon News.

Remember to help support the Fields in Core sprint! It's an immensely important undertaking for Drupal's future.

Visit the DrupalNews site

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Sanyo, the Fortune 500 electronics company, used Drupal to build a nice product catalog website at http://www.sanyo.com.au. The site went live earlier this week and features 250 products in 30 categories with over one GB of PDF files. More functionality is being added iteratively.

It sounds like they would be an ideal candidate for Acquia's upcoming hosted search service which will be able to search PDF documents as well as regular Drupal content. According to Luke Schreur from Tequila Digital Australia, the company responsible for the implementation, CCK was the most important module for this project. Luke said that they are already deploying Drupal for other clients and that more programmers at Tequila Digital are getting into Drupal. Great!

Recently Dries had a blog post about how both Mollom and Acquia, are using a freemium business model. Drupal being a free product, you could argue that any company out there that contributes back to the community has some sort of freemium business model (often really watered down of course).

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pingVision has been working on a Drupal update for SportingNews.com. The first phase of the multi-phase project is in testing and when it is released, the public face of the site will boast robust articles with features designed to enhance the news reading experience. However, the best bits are under the hood.

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Lullabot's new Drupal book, Using Drupal, is getting quite a bit of coverage and has already garnered at least one solid review. (Thanks, Steph!) What's particularly exciting about the book for me is that this marks the first major appearance of Ubercart in print!

I was informed about the chapter a bit before the book was announced publicly and was totally excited by the news. What made it even sweeter was that webchick did a thorough technical review of the Ubercart chapter and flooded our issue tracker for a couple of days with bug reports and usability suggestions. Isn't it great how that works? The book gets a better chapter and the community gets a better Ubercart.

At least one person believes that the chapter devoted to Ubercart is worth the price of the entire book. If you've been waiting for a chance to get a solid overview of and introduction to installing and configuring Ubercart, then Using Drupal is the book for you.

Today Lullabot released an exciting new project into the Drupal community. It's the Form builder module: an AJAX, Drag and Drop interface for constructing forms in Drupal. We hope that it will become the defacto standard in building forms in Drupal, replacing our inconsistent form-building tools that are spread across CCK, Webform, Profile, and other modules.

Drag and drop and AJAXy, but degrades too! No need for JavaScript required. Overview

The Form builder project reads and modifies Form API arrays. Using a well-known data-structure that most Drupal developers are familiar with should make for low barrier to entry for utilizing the new module.

The project uses a AJAX-based interface for updating form elements. As you modify properties such as "Title" or "Description", Form builder makes requests in the background to update the element through Drupal's internal FAPI system. The user gets a live preview of their changes without saving the form. This approach means that no additional JavaScript needs to be written by implementing modules, since the rendering is done in PHP and then sent to the client as needed.

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Next week marks the beginning of Do It With Drupal, the three day conference made of pure awesome held in New Orleans.

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I've been working with drupal and have been a part of the community for a fews years now. Although I may not be the most active member around, I have attended a decent amount of drupal meetups all over Massachusetts and New York City.

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Through Safari Books Online, we got an early look at the upcoming O’Reilly book, Using Drupal, by the Lullabots, aka Angela Byron, read more

Spotlight Verlag, a well-known German publisher, recently launched another Drupal site: http://www.business-spotlight.de.

Udo Gerhards, Project Manager Online at Spotlight Verlag, explained to me that the site is targeted at language learners and that they built a number of complex interactive language tests; see here for a JavaScript based drag and drop test, and see here for a regular multi-page HTML form test. Development of the site was done mainly by their in-house development team, with some help from Auvica.

When asked, Udo told me that CCK, Views and Panels were the main reasons for using Drupal. Their biggest pain point was in staging their development environment to reliably push big changes to their production environment.

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In a recent tweet, Tim O'Reilly announced that the O'Reilly Drupal book is released from O'Reilly. The book will start shipping later this month so time to order your copies, folks!

I provided technical review of some early versions of chapters, and I can tell you that the book is as good as you'd suspect it would be from Lullabot and O'Reilly. The book does an excellent job explaining how to rapidly assemble a wide variety of websites using some of Drupal’s most commonly used modules. Whether you are new to building Drupal websites or an experienced programmer, by the end of this book, you’ll be much more prepared to build the Drupal site of your dreams.

I've always had a healthy fetish for O'Reilly books, so I'll dance from happiness the day the "Using Drupal" book shows up at my doorstep. Thanks Angela, Addi, Nate, Jeff Eaton, James, and Jeff Robbins!

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It was a funny week when it comes to squashing bugs in a few projects I'm involved with. Less is more and this is also true when it comes to debugging I guess, always look in common places if you encouter strange things. So here's a small list I'm really going to add on my checklist of debugging tips:

1: Always look in watchdog first. Almost everything within Drupal comes from the database and quite often when data is (partially) missing, it's because a query goes wrong. My use case: developer 1 defines some fields in the views ui and than implemented a views_query_alter hook in a module. Two days later, developer 2 decided to change the fields and poof, the query_alter completely freaked out, no content was shown and developer 1 didn't even knew about the views change. After 3 hours, he noticed the watchdog error and saw a field was missing.

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Drupal's tagging vocabularies are really useful when webmasters and admins can not anticipate what categories or terms content authors and editors are going to need. The pitfall however, is that it is too easy for content editors to make a mess of the vocabulary by creating duplicate terms that are spelled wrong, similar to or synonymous of existing terms. And a "dirty" vocabulary such as this can be rather difficult to clean up and can be a real problem if content needs to be structured.

The alternative is to create a fixed vocabulary which can only have terms added through the taxonomy admin UI. This avoids building a messy vocabulary, but does away all of the advantages of a folksonomy, or tags vocabulary.

I recently learned a technique that offers most of the best parts of both worlds. Here's the recipe;

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After working full time with Drupal for 2 months, I really needed a decent debugging interface. I was tied up with using dsm(..) and var_dump(..) all the time!

Also, my lovely computer and Eclipse decided they didn't liked each other... 64bit and Eclipse, it's still a mystery what exactly went wrong or what exactly went right... Now this fight is all over and my love (and my computers) for Eclipse is back for good!

Working with Visual Studio 2005 before I learned to like the 'breakpoint' thing in .net environments.
In my hunt for a solution, I found an easy way to get the same effect for Drupal in Eclipse (and to make it even harder, in 64bit! - but this guide will also work for 32bit systems).

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Drupalcamp Colorado this summer was a rousing success. There were well over 100 registrants. We had two full days with sessions and quite a few BOFs. While a rag-tag bunch of do-o-crats did a great job putting the camp together, we found we needed more organization to make everything perfect.

• We wanted an easier time soliciting donations.
• We wanted ways to pursue grant monies.
• In short, we needed a nonprofit to help out.

Who better but a bunch of Drupal-heads to know the needs for such a nonprofit?

Come join a discussion on the ins and outs of putting together a 501(c)3 in a Birds of a Feather session at Drupalcon DC.

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My first book, "Using Drupal" will be shipped December 16, 2008. I co-authored the book with several other incredible Lullabots: Angie Byron, Addi Berry, Jeff Eaton, James Walker and Jeff Robbins. I'm very, very excited about the release of this book, not only because it's the first one I've authored, but because of the subject matter covered. There are several other books on Drupal (including the excellent Pro Drupal Development book, also authored by Lullabots John VanDyk and Matt Westgate), but none of them approach Drupal with such comprehensive coverage of actually using the software to build websites. It's also the first book to extensively cover contributed modules in addition to Drupal core.

Despite having worked on the book for well over a year, it's hard to believe it's really here. Today I received a newsletter from O'Reilly containing my biography for the book. The book is already available through O'Reilly's excellent Safari service. I haven't received my physical copies yet, but I guess it's already undeniable that the book really is finished and one more life goal accomplished.

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The degree to which privacy is protected on the web is determined not only by the policies and practices of a particular site. In a web application, it also depends on the software the site is built on.

Drupal excels at enabling individuals to share information. How strong is Drupal's corresponding support for protecting personal information and privacy? To answer this question, we'll look at display of private information, IP address logging, cookie use, and users' control over their own data.

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It has been presented to me in forum discussions on drupal that people are experiencing issues with their user's sessions on their drupal sites in Safari. Most experience the same issue:  read more »

• A user logs in, tries to create content and are kicked / logged out and taken to the homepage

The Marriott hotel has extended our group rate until Thursday, December 4th! If you haven't yet booked your room, do it now! Call the Marriott at 1.888.364.1200 and use the group code "LTCLTCA" to get the discount rate of $149/night.

The Marriott is where the event is happening and where all of the speakers and most of the attendees will be staying. They've got several restaurants and a big common-area in the lobby and this will be a great opportunity to connect with speakers and other attendees, makes some friends, rub some elbows, and exchange some business cards.

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