Drupal Themes

Well I really got into the idea of Leveraging Drupal (re-use) as opposed to building from scratch, so... I decided to write a book!

Leveraging Drupal http://www.amazon.com/Leveraging-Drupal-Getting-Your-Right/dp/0470410876

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Previously we computed the "related projects" by using the frequency of project co-mentions in discussions. For example, if the module Fivestar and CCK were mentioned together in 33 different discussion threads, whereas Fivestar and jRating in 10 threads, then we would think CCK was more relevant to Fivestar than jRating because it has more co-mentions.

However, that algorithm ignores the fact that some very popular modules like CCK simply have more chances to get mentioned, even if it's not that relevant in the context.

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One of the primary goals of Ubercart is to make it easy for folks to sell products and services through their Drupal powered websites. This has been working quite well for us, and we can only get better.

One of the primary goals of a lot of companies is to sell their stuff online. This also works out quite well for us, because a lot of these people don't want to pay money for their shopping cart software but want a lot of the features that Drupal and its contributed modules already provide.

Then there are people who write articles to try and help those companies find software like ours. Enter PC Mag and their recent article titled 31 Days to a Brand-New Web Storefront. The article is definitely aimed at the lowest common denominator, but that didn't stop them from recommending Ubercart for folks with "the technical acumen" looking to roll their own solution.

How cool is that?

Bryght Re-visited

Bryght, the pioneering Drupal hosting platform is tuned-up and ready for your web community building.

Quick-starting and infinitely extendable, Bryght's refined packages are designed specifically for content publishers - from heavily-trafficked enterprises, through to emerging organizations, and individuals seeking their own Gutenberg press for personal expression.

Now available in Free, Cheap, or Fancy

Defining the Drupal hosting space since 2004, Raincity Studios continues Bryght's tradition of setting the standard for open source web community publishing. Since the Raincity Studios acquisition of Bryght in Nov. 2007, we've carefully observed what Bryght customers produce on the platform, and explored many Drupal sites in the wild. Armed with this knowledge, we've honed the Bryght packages to fit your specific expectations. As such, you are sure to find a fit for your current needs, as well as a sensible upgrade path for continued happiness.

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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.

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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

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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.
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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:

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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.

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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!)

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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.

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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:

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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:

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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

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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:

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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.

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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 [...]