Drupal News

3281d Consulting: Packaged install profiles ready for testing on d6.project.drupal.org

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 20:55:39 -0800

3281d Consulting is pleased to announce that fully packaged installation profile releases are now available for testing on http://d6.project.drupal.org. This feature has enormous potential to expand Drupal adoption to new audiences by significantly lowering the barrier for end users trying to get a customized distribution up and ready for the kind of site they're building. Instead of separately downloading Drupal core, an installation profile release, and then manually cobbling together all the module and theme dependencies, installation profiles can now be packaged with core and all of their dependencies already included.

This system is all going to go live on drupal.org on Tuesday 2009-12-01 2am-3am UTC. However, it'd be extremely helpful if people who maintain installation profiles (either currently or planning to do so in the near future) would be willing to test the new packaging system to provide feedback on how it all works, and flesh out any problems before deployment on the main site.

Mogdesign: DrupalCamp Vienna 2010 Report

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:53:08 -0800

This Friday and Saturday (27 – 28 Nov) DrupalCamp Vienna was happening at the Vienna Tech University. Over 200 Drupalists from Slovakia, Slovenia, Czech, Hungary, USA, Canada, Ireland, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Germany, Argentina and a few Austrians ;) came to enjoy networking, learn new stuff and share knowledge. Here is a short summary from sessions I was able to attend.

CodeGobbler.com: Make a Drupal Block Visible for Entire Site Sections but NOT Specific Sub-sections or Pages

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:09:02 -0800

This little php snippet has come to the rescue many times throughout my Drupal development days. It lets you use includes and excludes in your Drupal block visibility settings - something that you can not do out of the box.

For example, it would allow you to:

Appnovation Technologies: Top 10 iPhone apps used by the Appnovation Team

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:38:46 -0800

Sat, Nov 28, 2009 by Ken

Just across the room in our office, here are some of the top iphone apps.

1. Facebook.
We can all pretty much agree that facebook is quite popular, I think this is still an understatement. Why not have facebook connected to you no matter where you go with your iphone.

About Facebook
“Facebook is a social utility that connects you to the people around you. Facebook on iPhone and iPod touch allows you to do it all:
- Get the latest news from your friends
- Upload and share photos
- Send and receive messages”

2. Flixster.
Bored? Why not catch a movie. Get the latest movie times and ratings on the current movies.

About Flixster
“Movies by Flixster is the #1 movie app for the iPhone and iPod Touch to watch movie trailers, get show times and share movie ratings with your friends.”

3. Remote.
Are you lazy? A couch-potato? Okay, fine you do not have to be lazy to get this app. You can use this app to control your devices like Mac computer or Apple TV from your iPods .

Károly Négyesi: Core changes announcement tweet

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:42:06 -0800

This is more a dream than anything else but wouldnt it be great if the bigger changes were tweeted like "themers: check this issue, we have overhauled hook_theme". Ideally some field experts would be able to look at the change (and only the change they need to know of because this way they do not need to follow the sometimes overwhelming core development) and raise red flags if it won't work for them. Yeah, I am dreaming.

Chuva Inc.: DrupalCamp Campinas 2: Final Report

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:22:30 -0800

On November 31 and October 1st, the second Brazilian DrupalCamp took place on the University of Campinas. Dozens of drupallers met for two days, to discuss and do Drupal.

Imagem para destaque:

Károly Négyesi: Mini Drupal cycles

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:38:40 -0800

Continuing my previous post here are some ideas on how could Drupal development process happen in the future. Let's say on January 1 the UX team begins to work on a design. As reusable UI patterns are part of the framework, I am not specifying whether they work on the framework or the product, they work on better user experience. Their goal is to come up with wireframes, getting feedback and getting some simple mock/skeleton implementation.

Drupal.org frontpage posts for the Drupal planet: Scheduled drupal.org downtime Tuesday 2009-12-01 2-3am UTC

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:50:16 -0800

On Tuesday 2009-12-01 from 2:00am until 3:00am UTC (Monday 2009-11-30 6-7pm PST), drupal.org will be down for scheduled maintenance. We'll be deploying the necessary changes to support fully packaged installation profiles, so that when you download an installation profile, you get a complete file archive with Drupal core, the profile, and all of its module and theme dependencies. Once the new packaging system is live, we'll post another announcement about how it works for both end users and installation profile maintainers. Thanks in advance for your understanding, and apologies for any inconvenience the downtime might cause.

Dan Karran: Drupal developer with an interest in all things geo

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 07:36:56 -0800

After two years of working from home, I've decided it's time to make a move back into an office and look for some contract-based or perhaps permanent work in London.

I have four years of experience using, developing and helping guide the development of Drupal projects as well as a background and interest in all things geographic, from maps to open data (as you've probably seen from the topics I cover in my blog). With these skills I am looking to find some work as a Drupal developer for an organisation based in London, ideally integrating my geographic interest. Alternatively, I'm open to other opportunities that I may be suitable for.

If you have, or know of, any positions coming up from January onwards, I'd love to hear from you to discuss the details. You can find out more information about me in my CV (pdf) or on my LinkedIn profile.

Twitter lists to help network Drupal designers and developers

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 01:52:35 -0800

I'm building Twitter lists for Drupal designers and developers.
The idea is that by following the appropriate list - and in turn being followed - will help share knowledge, ideas and news in the Drupal community.

If you're on Twitter and want to join please follow the list you like.
http://twitter.com/drupalshire

Of course, we can add other lists to and open to suggestions for categories.
Thanks all.
http://www.drupalshire.org/

Appnovation Technologies: Upgrading Drupal custom modules

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:06:48 -0800

Thu, Nov 26, 2009 by steve

Recently we worked on a project to upgrade a website from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6. There were quite a few custom modules and we chose to take advantage of the deadwood, schema and coder modules, as described in this article . This sped up the conversion process, as the deadwood module made many changes on the original D5 code automatically and the coder module pointed us to places in the code that were incompatible with D6 and required modification.

Manual check and modification is still the most important part of this process, though these modules can often be a great help.

The following are some of the issues that we came across in the conversion process:

1) deadwood might automatically make an unwanted change

We found deadwood automatically converted a function some_prefix_access($node) in D5 to some_prefix_access($op, $node, $account) in D6. However, some_prefix was not the name of the current module and this function was not an implementation of hook_access. This automatic change was not desired.

Development Seed: DrupalCamp Peru Version 2.0 This Saturday

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 09:39:39 -0800

The second DrupalCamp Peru is taking place this Saturday in Lima. While the first DrupalCamp in Lima was held during a larger Software Freedom Day event, this one will focus solely on Drupal. This is just another indicator of Drupal's growth in Peru. The presentations planned range from "What is Drupal" and "DrupalChix" to be presented by Danny Montalvo and Rosa María Orellana respectively, to "Using JQuery extensions for Visual Effects in Our Drupal Themes" to be presented by Nicolas Borda.

Appnovation Technologies: Aquaculture Association of Canada Web Site Launched in Drupal

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:49:36 -0800

Thu, Nov 26, 2009 by Arnold

We have just launched the new Aquaculture Society of Canada web site in Drupal.

The site allows users to sign up for membership and pay the membership fees via PayPal. Members are also reminded of their annual membership renewals. They are able to renew their membership via the site.

Conference events can also be created on the site with the ability for members to signup through the site.

The E-Commerce areas of the web site is power by Ubercart.

Alan Palazzolo: Merci Beaucoup, Genève, pour Première Réunion Drupal!

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:35:06 -0800

Creating a Local Commnuity in Geneva

Sorry if French is bad. I have been kind of quiet for the past few months. This is because I have just moved from Minneapolis, US to Geneva, Switzerland to start work at Shelter Centre. It's a very exciting move for me for many reasons; but that isn't really the intention of this post.

Anyway, what is really amazing, is that after being here for only two weeks, (with a little bit of help) I was able to get almost 25 local people together for drinks and Drupal! How? About a month or so ago, I couldn't find any information on a Geneva Drupal meetup; so I started a thread to "announce" my migration and to see if anyone was interested in a meetup, and voila! We had a couple dozen wonderful people talking about Drupal tonight. Also, we had very good feedback, and should be able to make this a monthly thing. My sincerest apologies for not knowing French yet, but I am on my way.

Károly Négyesi: Drupal 8 maintainers

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:44:56 -0800

As read in Dries' blog post about Drupal 8 there will be a framework and an application maintainer for Drupal 8. I would like to be the framework maintainer but obviously the decision is Dries'. My actual coding contributions have decreased significantly recently anyways and this would be a fantastic way to continue contributing to Drupal. I will write more on this blog about our goals for Drupal 8.

Do it With Drupal: Sponsor Spotlight: Four Kitchens

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:27:32 -0800

Lullabot is proud to announce that not only will Todd Ross Nienkerk & Aaron Stanush of Four Kitchens be speaking at Do It With Drupal this year, but Four Kitchens is also a sponsor!

Metal Toad: Quick Drupal Cacherouter and Boost benchmarks

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:30:01 -0800

In the discussion following my last post about cron and the cache hit rate, I promised to do some testing of the different cacherouter backends, as well as Boost. Again, these tests focus on the needs of a smallish site with 500 nodes and 1200 requests per day. Boost is the clear winner for response time (which shouldn't be a surprise given that it allows the web server to deliver HTML files directly from disk). What's interesting though is that the response times are all close enough that it doesn't really matter what caching backend you choose (An end user cannot perceive the difference between 6ms and 2ms, and throughput isn't an issue at this scale). The only factor that's really relevant is how good your system's cache expiration and regeneration logic is. I haven't yet had a chance to explore this aspect in detail, but it seems like Boost is the clear winner here as well.

Ventura Cottage: Ubercart - running straight out the box

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:16:23 -0800

I am working on a type of advanced profile (actually zipped site and sql dump) that will enable others to get Drupal and Ubercart 2 up and running within minutes.
You can see and USE the demo at http://ubercart.venturacottage.com Out the box it has been configured to handle:

joshmiller: Druplicon Freelancing as Music Video Avatar?

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:58:28 -0800

[Click "Read More" to see the embedded video for RSS readers...]

Is it just me or is this video proof that Druplicon is freelancing on the side?

Victor Kane: Google Translate madness for Drupal - stick it in with a simple template addition

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 04:52:58 -0800

This short article explains how to quickly and easily add Google Translate functionality to Drupal content without hacking any blocks or the actual content itself. You simply stick it into a page template where it belongs.

I guess this should be done up as a module like the Google Analytics module, which helps you configure the addition of the necessary HTML and Javascript code to the pages you want through an admin interface, especially considering you need a Google key for Analytics.

But for Google Translate you do not need any keys yet and this is so simple it's hardly worth the CVS.

Steve Karsch: Catching Up On Drupal 7

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:10:04 -0800

It's been almost 4 months since my Drupal 7: What's In It For You? presentation and in that time we've had: Drupalcon Paris, Code Slush, Code Freeze and numerous code, UX and doc sprints. I thought now might be a good time to check out the latest from CVS and see what's new.

A lot is new. Drupal 7 should prove to be a huge step forward for Drupal. This post will focus mostly on some of the big end-user features that have gone in since the end of August.

New Admin and Installer Theme

Just as I was getting on the train after Drupalcamp Philly, I saw Dries' tweet about the new Seven administration theme. The Seven theme is a clean, single-column theme from Mark Boulton Design that aims to create a delineation between the admin side of Drupal and the user side of Drupal.

It looks so nice that it even serves as the new installer theme.

Pronovix: Knowledge managment in Open Atrium: our feature stack

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:55:25 -0800

Ever since Open Atrium went public we've been working on integrating our knowledge management features into it. Yesterday we cleared the final hurdle to get our stack into beta. In this screencast you'll see the following features/modules in action:

In the next months we want to wrap our features into a new distribution. Obviously this all still needs some clean up and it'll take us still a bit of time to finish the package. Somewhere early 2010 we'll start providing a hosted version of the distribution to make it's functionality accessible for people that want hassle free functionality upgrades or that don't have the knowledge/time to do security updates.

Stella Power: New releases for FAQ - 6.x-1.9, 5.x-2.13

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:02:57 -0800

New releases of the FAQ module have been made - versions 5.x-2.13 and 6.x-1.9. This release includes a fair few new features, including the ability to drag and drop questions when re-ordering and a new "administer faq weights" permission. There are also a number of bug fixes too.

The new features added include:

#390404 - added [faq] input filter.
#475600 - added "administer faq weights" permission, and moved weight ordering tab to each individual FAQ page.
#614378 - added in drag and drop question ordering.
#388714 - added a new category layout.
#409560 - added in an expand all / collapse all link.
#500822 - added accordion effect option for hide answer/category layouts.

The new releases can be downloaded from the FAQ project page, while details on the changes can be found below:

FAQ 6.x-1.9
FAQ 5.x-2.13

Enjoy!

Dale McGladdery: Book Review: Drupal 6 Content Administration

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:35:34 -0800

Anyone who's tried to explain Drupal's content feature-set to the uninitiated appreciates the amount of territory that needs covering as well as the challenges inherent in presentation depth and order. J. Ayen Green takes up the challenge in his book, Drupal 6 Content Administration, published by Packt Publishing. Packt graciously provided me a copy for review.

The stated purpose of Drupal 6 Content Administration is "a quick-start guide that best serves Drupal Content Editors." Green is serious about the audience and serious about the content focus. The discussion and examples are firmly rooted on content and live in the user interface, using language targeted to the audience; except for the appendix, there are no digressions into unrelated topics like site administration, SEO, or account management.

Davy Van Den Bremt: "Introduction to Drupal", presentation slides

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:20:16 -0800

Following up on my presentation slides of "Drupal 7 - What's new (from an end-user perspective) ?", I have now upload my slides "Introduction to Drupal" of a presentation I did for our Drupal seminar at Calibrate seminar, organised by BuzzBerry.

This is a non-technical introduction. It's more targeted to people who have no idea on what Drupal is and what makes it so great.

It's built up from a few questions:

agileapproach.com: Using hook_views_query_alter to change your views sort order

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 07:05:20 -0800

Sometimes you might need some extra help getting views to sort correctly. This is especially the case when sorting on a column that might include NULL values, or when your criteria for how results should sort is complex. Instead of implementing template logic to correct the result sorting, you can use hook_views_query_alter to modify the sort criteria in the query itself.

Introducing a new Drupal development shop : Agence Inovae

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:42:03 -0800

Fellow drupallers, I'm really proud to introduce our new Drupal shop! Inovae (www.agenceinovae.com/en) was created a couple of weeks ago in Geneva, Switzerland and is now a three man operation formed by Alexis Dufresne aka patchak, a long time Drupal user and enthousiast, Kian Rieben an anthropological analyst of technology, and a hardcore programmer and longtime member of the community, Aron Novak!Inovae was launched and registered in Geneva, Switzerland, but we are happy to work with any client, anywhere!

Inovae is the result of more than 3 years of active Drupal development, in which period Alexis Dufresne created really strong links with the Drupal community and, amongst other great people, Aron Novak, who is now lead developer over at Inovae!

Kieran Lal: Getting the drupal.org re-design implemented: Drupal companies please sponsor a section

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:45:26 -0800

For the last year the Drupal.org redesign has progressed quietly and steadily. Almost 200 people have participated in the redesign by commenting, discussing, reviewing, testing, designing, theming, or writing code to get it done. We have had 6 re-design sprints (2 in Europe and 4 in the US) and built significant infrastructure to get the redesign development and staging ready for the community to make the final push. We are now asking Drupal consulting shops to step forward and help us implement one section of the redesign.

Many of the most important features are already available such as search, or improvements to the project module. In order to get the redesign completed we've reviewed the design and identified the minimum viable product for drupal.org.

A minimum viable product for Drupal.org means deciding what are the most essential parts of drupal.org that will go live when the design is refreshed. It also means defining what will be finished off after the initial launch. The remaining features will be designed and prioritized based on feedback from people who visit the site.

To understand how we selected the minimum viable product it is important to revisit the intent of the redesign and understand the motivations of the people who use drupal.org. The most important motivations were:

getting access to specific information
monitoring issues
continuing conversations

The minimum viable product must have the most important user journeys re-designed. For 'new users', they consider the movement from Home to About/Why Choose Drupal and/or or Get Started the most important user journey. So we must have those sections of the site done. For ‘existing’ users the primary user journeys are to specific content via search/search results and to monitor content/issues/discussions/news etc. In the redesigned site this navigation will be done via the dashboard. The dashboard must have this basic navigation for the minimum viable product. Currently, existing drupal.org users use bookmarks, and they use the URLs which they have memorized to navigate around drupal.org.

If you want to review the motivations for the minimum viable product please read the re-design post about new users and existing users, and insights into the drupal.org design strategies.

We also wanted to take a more analytic approach and review the most common paths. We turned to Google analytics and reviewed two reports, the Top Content Detail Path report and the top content detail navigation report. This gave us 50 paths to review to ensure the new site worked before we launched the redesign.

What needs to be done:

The design deliverables from Mark Boulton Design lists approximately 25 landing pages. Many of those pages are quite complex and need both custom programming, additional theming, and content. To help get these pages done, we've evaluated the complexity of these landing pages 1(easy) through 3 (complex).

We are also asking Drupal development firms to step forward and sponsor a page. For each page, we request that a rough evaluation be started by Dec 1st, and a goal of completion by Jan 15th.If you are interested in sponsoring a page, please contact us using the "Implement part of the drupal.org redesign" category.

We have two project managers who will be helping to coordinate the efforts. They are myself, and Lisa Rex. The project managers will work with the contributing development shops and the existing contributors to the redesign to help it be completed. We also will work with Dries to coordinate how drupal.org will evolve.

We have also recruited a new redesign infrastructure team that has been managing and updating our ten development and staging sites. We are still recruiting administrators for that effort and I'll blog more about the progress we are making soon.

Redesign page	Effort Score	Notes
1. Home page	3	Utility navigation which is basically dashboard Develop with Drupal section where do the links go: Current activity, etc. Dean and Kieran need to implement advertising block on the front page of Drupal.org Map on home page - Follow up with Dmitri connect to tweets or news about what's going on Druplicon stats seems to be working with dynamic number of users [Secondary Tabs] - News, Doc Updates, Forums posts, Commits, More
2. Dashboard	3	Check with Neil Drumm
3. About	2
6. News	2	Theme planet Drupal
7.Get started	3	Conflict on getting started page, same alias as Documentation main page Getting started page has lots of search results. Are these implemented as panels? * Most popular modules * Most popular Themes * Translations * Handbooks could be hard-coded * Recent Books and resources is probably a rotating block * Get support is just content * Translations to other languages * Requires dashboard, search with filters, Primary navigation, and footer block
8. Get involved	3
9. Association	2
10. Community and Support	3	* Tabs implemented in CSS * How can add the How can we help you? is going to either be a block or panels. * Where is the Drupal community right column is just text * Advertising block at the bottom * Recent activity block * * Requires dashboard, search with filters, Primary navigation, and footer block * * mailing lists: Score 3
10.1 Community IRC	1
11. Documentation	2	* CSS four tabs, Three column layout * Docs home page, API do we link to other sites or is this landing page a druplicate of those sites main pages. * Mostly content in columns. * Advertising block on bottom right * Advertising books on bottom block
11.1 Documentation Index	2	* Three column layout * Articles will be interesting * Documentation API is just links, 2 column layout
11.2 Documentation API	1	* just text * Recently updated, search result
12. Download & Extend	3	* Eight tabs and lots of search blocks and it's all project module searches
12.1 Download & Extend: Core	3	* Developers for Drupal core
12.2 Download & Extend: Modules	3	* http://drupal.org/project/modules needs to be improved. So we have to go look at search filtering and how to improve it.
12.2.1 Download & Extend: Module Example	3	Pretty significant reworking of a project module interface and content * Groups out of questions * Community rating -- recommendations Search results that are related Activity graphing Screenshots or carousel
12.3 Download & Extend: Themes	3
14. Search results	3	* Search filters need to get done. Talk to Apache gurus. * Popular searches * Need a search again block in right hand column, removed from main page * Order by needs to be a drop down, not a block on the right * Implement or filter for. Which means having more content types defined by taxonomy.
14.1 Refine your search - Themes	3
Log-in	1

Case Study: SFPublicPress.org, A News Site for the 21st Century

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:45:20 -0800

How do you build a modern news Web site that gives editors the tools they needs to serve San Francisco with in-depth reporting on important local issues — all without spending millions of dollars? You use Drupal.

That’s exactly what the nonprofit news organization SF Public Press did when it built SFPublicPress.org.

Although the startup focuses on the stories that other news organizations aren’t covering, it still has to compete for the attention of today’s tech-savvy readers who have many options for receiving news.

To do that, SFPublicPress.org offers much more than news articles on the Web. Among other things, the site features:

audio and video to help convey what text can’t;
an interactive media gallery that gives readers new ways to dive into stories;
easily-accessible bio pages for reporters and editors so it’s clear who is behind each story;
RSS feeds to keep readers informed as soon as news hits the site.

With all these features and more, it’s hard to believe that building the site took fewer than 60 development hours. (It’s hard to believe even for me — and I built it!) But that’s the power of the Drupal content management system, and that’s why I recommend it as the platform for many of my clients’ sites.

How We Did It

Whitehouse.gov re-launches on Drupal and engages the Drupal community at DC users meeting

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:23:53 -0800

Earlier this month, the Executive Office of the President of the United States of America relaunched their website, Whitehouse.gov, using Drupal. This week three members of the White House new media team presented at the Washington, DC Drupal users group. New media director Macon Phillips, deputy director of technology David Cole, and creative director Nik Lo Bue talked about their use of Drupal.

In this video, Macon Phillips addresses how they want to create opportunities for citizens to participate in their government. David Cole talks about why they wanted to change their technology platform, what they actually built, and where they are going with that new platform. Nik Lo Bue addresses how he wanted to use an amazing brand experience to visually communicate with citizens using Drupal.

New theme which has Event functionality

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:16:51 -0800

Hi,

After a previous Bandura theme, we receive some feedbacks from you and we have spent a month to prepare for a new theme called ST Duduk. This one has Event functionality which you can announce upcoming events of your own.

http://www.symphonythemes.com/node/119

Here are some features of Duduk (you can see it on a demo site):

* XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS 2.0 Valid
* 13 Regions
* 4 menu options: CSS, Split and ST and Nifty Menu
* Twitter module
* Image Slideshow
* Event feature
* PSD file included
* Customize using Theme Settings
* Drupal 6.x
* Professional Typography

We look forward to have feedbacks from you. And we still have Alphorn and Conch free.

Contract Drupal Engineer Needed ASAP

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:12:22 -0800

DRUPAL ENGINEER-Contract
We are currently seeking a Web Engineer to help in the development of a diverse mix of projects ranging from retail product demos and corporate presentations to web events and major motion picture theatrical release Web sites.

Experience Required:

• Minimum 2+ years as a Web Engineer.
• Drupal
• CSS
• PHP
• Javascript
• Front End experience
• Mysql
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills • Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

No Agencies Please

Please send your resume and salary requirements to hr@designreactor.com

_{Edited by WorldFallz - moved to appropriate forum}

ThemeNews Drupal News/Magazine Theme Released

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:36:26 -0800

We released the ThemeNews Drupal theme that caters to News, Magazine, or other content-rich websites. You can preview the theme here and let us know what you think:

http://www.themesnap.com/theme-demos/theme-news/

Some of the ThemeNews Theme Features include:

* SEO Friendly source code
* No Installation Profile Needed!
* Perfect for 125x125 Ads and Affiliate Links
* Simple to Setup
* Easy to Customize via the CSS File
* Clean, easy to read layout
* jQuery Drop Down Menu
* Stylish News Display
and much more...

We are working on several premium themes that I'd like to see contributed back to Drupal in the coming month or two. I'm finishing up the Digital Magazine theme in the coming week and thinking seriously about contributing that one back to Drupal.org with the installation profile included. You can view a small snapshot of this theme on ThemeSnap.com (the Drupal themes page).

We are also working on an new SEO module that will be contributed back. It's about 80% complete and should be finished within the next 2 weeks. This module will give Drupal users much more SEO flexibility and optimization avenues than any Drupal SEO module available to date.

Let me know what you'd like to see built next or what you think of the ThemeNews theme.

Best,
Brian

Drupal.org update at 6 PST CST, bot down from 3 PM PST to 7 PM PST

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:06:36 -0800

The testing bot will be disabled from 3 PM PST to 7 PM PST for an upgrade. Drupal.org will be down for about 15 minutes from around 6 PM PST.

Please note that any patches posted in the issue queue during this downtime will not be tested until that issue is updated again with a comment.

Drupal wins Hall of Fame Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:22:43 -0800

Drupal has won the Hall of Fame Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Drupal previously won the 2007 and 2008 Best Overall Open Source CMS Award. As a result of the previous wins, Drupal graduated to the Hall of Fame along with Joomla.

It is a great honor for the Drupal community to be the first winner of the Open Source CMS Hall of Fame Award. The Drupal community has worked hard to improve Drupal by adding internationalization, enhancing security, facilitating customization, increasing extensibility, and easing the user experience. This award is a great complement to winning the 2009 Open Source PHP CMS for the second year in a row. This critical recognition helps build both momentum and excitement towards releasing Drupal 7 in 2010.

This award has a $4000 prize, bringing the total prize money from the Packt Open Source CMS awards to $6000. The money will go to the Drupal association to help pay for drupal.org infrastructure, marketing, and Drupalcon events.

Drupal wins best open source PHP CMS for second year in a row

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:43:32 -0800

Drupal has won best open source PHP Content Management System for the second year in a row in the Packt Publishing 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Drupal won by popular vote and a critical selection by a panel of judges. This award reflects the strong support of the Drupal community and our focus on quality which leads to critical acclaim and rapid adoption for large, high quality projects. Drupal won best overall open source CMS in 2007 and 2008.

From the award announcement,

We are pleased to announce that Drupal has won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This category featured a very close contest between the top three, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! in which Drupal ended up as the overall choice for the judges and the public.

While Drupal and Joomla! have always consistently featured among the top three in this category, WordPress made its way into the top five for the first time. The fact that it was outranked by Drupal by a very slight margin indicates how popular it has become with users as well as developers over the past year.

YAY!! Drupal wins Best Open Source PHP CMS Category!

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:15:56 -0800

Just found this!
http://www.packtpub.com/award

Warm regards to everyone!
Pepe :-)

Why is Drupal intimidating to newbies?

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:22:44 -0800

I created my first YouTube video - about Drupal!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8crDQxc01M

Drupal.org Estimated Worth $1.5 Million USD

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 10:50:00 -0800

Drupal.org Estimated Worth $1.5 Million USD
Title Drupal
Description Official homepage of the open source content management system. Offers documentation and the source for download and hosts a developers and community portal.
Daily Pageview 1,426,719
Daily Ads Revenue $2,101.21
Traffic Rank 771(Alexa World Rank)
Page Rank 0(Goolge Page Rank)

check it out here http://www.thenetinfo.com/stats/drupal.org

Win Free Drupalcon SF 2010 Tickets!

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:41:46 -0800

Heading to Drupalcon San Francisco in April? Here's your chance to get in for free! We're giving away two pairs of tickets over at DrupalModules.com. Thanks to our new sponsor, Drupalcon SF, for providing tickets!

The contest ends November 30th, so enter soon! :)

I just found out that the new website of the US White House is in Drupal!

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:04:07 -0800

Hi everybody!!! Did you know that the new website of the White House recently published by President Obama is done with Drupal???!!!!

I'm so proud of this and so thankful to the whole community. Let's all keep up with the good work.

Hugs!

Drupal.org turns over the 500,000th node!

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:17:37 -0800

One half meeellion nodes...

We saw the half millionth NID turn over in June. While we got pretty excited about that, we remembered that Drupal.org had employed some tricksy MYSQL replication somewhere back at node number 376445. From that point on, Drupal.org was churning out only even numbered NIDs and we were forced to cool our jets for a little while and wait for the true 1/2 million node maker.

A little math, and a little patience, and we landed on our proper half millionth node today. Here it is, in all of it's glory:
http://drupal.org/node/623556

Dries Buytaert named one of the Most Influential People In Open Source

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:32:44 -0800

This week Dries Buytaert, our Drupal project lead, was named one of the Most Influential People In Open Source. Dries was named specifically for his leadership to the Drupal project.

Dries Buytaert created Drupal in 2001 and has led the software project ever since. He has guided it through rapid growth and to widespread acclaim. Dries is able to motivate the burgeoning community of users and developers by communicating ‘the big picture’ while paying careful and measured attention to the technical details essential to good software development. These two factors have been crucial to Drupal’s popularity and success to date.

Please congratulate Dries on this well deserved recognition for his leadership and contributions to the Drupal project.

Drupal used in the White House

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:38:01 -0700

Whitehouse is using Drupal for its website - http://www.whitehouse.gov/

See - http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/drupal-moves-into-the-white-hou...

Kieran Lal: Building the Drupal.org re-design community infrastructure: Administrators wanted

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:42:25 -0700

One of the biggest challenges in working in a large community like the Drupal community is removing bottlenecks. All too often the community can seem to come to a grinding halt on just one issue that can only be managed by one person. On Monday Dries gave a presentation at MIT and talked about how some of the Drupal community’s biggest problems have helped create some of our best solutions. In particular, he cited how our drupal.org server melt down in 2005 lead to the creation of the Drupal association to proactively manage and plan for our infrastructure growth.
Today the community continues to be challenged with re-designing and implementing drupal.org. On the surface, it doesn’t look much has happened, but improvements in projects, and search have made big strides in making Drupal.org easier to use. The Drupal community works well in parallel and through lots of small iterations. Unfortunately, our drupal.org development and staging infrastructure has not supported dozens of developers and themers working in parallel. We’ve now taken the time to build out that parallel development and staging infrastructure.
It is important to understand why a large site like Drupal.org can be hard to do local development for. First, drupal.org serves about 30 million pages a month, and has over 600,000 nodes. It has tens of thousands of attached files including patches, screenshots, videos, and graphics. Setting up a greater than 1GB database and syncing over 5GB’s of files is a tough task for a local development environment.
Much of the new design for Drupal.org is focused on making it easier to find what you are looking for on Drupal.org. For the redesigned development sites we also need to have a working Solr server. For example, a page like the new download and extend landing page has Drupal version search filters and at least seven blocks that are search results themselves. For themers to theme pages, their Drupal.org site needs content, graphic assets, patch files which need to be attached to issue queues, and the site must have working functionality.
Also, Drupal.org content is valuable even though it is licensed under creative commons license. If a copy of the site were to fall into the hands of spammers Drupal.org could suffer abuse. For that reason, we don't casually give away copies of the drupal.org database and code to anyone who asks.
I'll review this new infrastructure and explain how our team plans to work to support at least 10 development sites in parallel.

The Servers

Web server

 The dedicated virtual machine at stagingvm.drupal.org contains 10 virtualhosts, and is entirely devoted to the redesign project. The webroot of this VM is /var/www.

Database Server 

The database server is separate, and lives on stagingdb.drupal.org (which is a cname pointing at civicspace.drupal.org, the solr slave).

The Sites

There are 10 staging sites for the redesign, each of them are password protected with: drupal/drupal to keep out search engines and bots. Staging 1 (staging1.drupal.org) through Staging 10 (staging10.drupal.org) are virtualhosts on the stagingvm.drupal.org server. Each site lives in it's own directory, /var/www/staging1 through /var/www/staging10, respectively. They are almost all setup with a recent copy of drupal.org.
Each of these virtualhost containers has a separate instance of drupal.org's codebase + sanitized database, and we will give selected volunteers the access to commit theming and administrative changes to an instance for testing purposes.

Backing up a site's database, restoring a site

The redesign administrators have two scripts in their stagingdb.drupal.org home dir, backup-tables and restore tables. The administrators have sudo and can run each script to backup or restore the last backup of a db. For example, if someone is going to test something on staging5 that will likely break it. You can ./backup-tables.sh staging5. Will take about 20 min and then ./restore-tables staging5 will restore the latest backup
Database copies of Drupal.org
Santized DB dumps of Drupal.org database are available on the stagingdb.drupal.org database server. The database server can hold 10 copies max. The problem there right now is that you need to take a dump of the drupal.org database server and then reload it into another database to run an SQL script on it. This continues to be a cumbersome process that can only be done by our two database administrators Narayan Newton and David Strauss.

Granting theme repository access

http://groups.drupal.org/drupalorg-redesign-implementers/guide * Once the drupal.org re-design developers and themers have signed up for an account on infrastructure.drupal.org we need to review their request and determine if they are a likely candidate to contribute. We get a lot of requests from people who just want to run the drupal.org theme on their own site. Right now over 35 community members have write access to the SVN, and several dozen have read access so they can generate patches. Admittedly, this approval process is a significant bottleneck.
Once the contributors account has been approved they can issue the following commands: svn checkout https://svn.drupal.org/drupal/themes/bluecheese/ * They can also log into SVN using their username and password from http://infrastructure.drupal.org.
The documentation tab on the front page of the Drupal.org redesign implementers group for more information about how to get access and use SVN.

Pushing theme changes to development sites

There is an SVN directory called development-themes that will be checked out to each sites /themes directory. Each themer can set the default theme for anyone of the 10 instances to see their changes go live. Since Drupal can support many themes we may be able to support dozens of themers working on a site simultaneously.

Theme Deployment

We have now setup cron jobs to checkout themes from the themers sandbox every 5 minutes.

Syncing Drupal.org production with a master staging site

Code and configuration changes happen on Drupal.org. We need to push these code and configuration changes to staging sites to keep them in sync. The staging sites are managed via an SVN branch HEAD == redesign and the live site is the SVN branch DRUPAL-6--1 == drupal.org. All configuration changes should be in drupalorg.install updates.
Deployment of code, content, and configuration changes continue to be one of the big challenges in Drupal and might be the big feature of Drupal 8. Many of Drupal’s best core innovations come from drupal.org necessities.

Pushing development configuration changes to all the staging sites

When new features are being built on a Drupal.org staging site, we need to push these same configuration changes to all ten of the staging sites, or they might not work as the developers and themers need them to.

Asset management

Since themers work with so many graphic assets we need a way for them to more easily share their working assets and get them accessible to the Drupal.org redesign staging sites.

Infrastructure administrators wanted

Now that our redesign infrastructure is built, we need Drupal administrators and developers to help with the development, staging, and deployment cycles for all 10 of these re-design sites. I know we’ve asked for infrastructure administrators before and there’s been a lot of interest. If you are still interested contact me . A big thank-you to our infrastructure team for making this possible.

Drupal 7 code freeze: status update and next steps

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:35:28 -0700

It was a close race to the finish -- or rather the beginning -- of the Drupal 7 code freeze process a couple of weeks ago. Now that we're in the middle of the code freeze, I wanted to update everyone on the current status of the freeze, and provide some guidance about where we go from here.

First and foremost, I know that both Angie (my Drupal 7 co-maintainer) and I want to express how excited we are about how everyone really pulled together as a team at the end, and who, by working together, got a lot of great stuff in before the deadline for the "code slush" passed. Of the exceptions we had previously noted (see slides for details), eight of the ten made it in. The two stated exceptions that didn't are (1) allowing user profiles to use the field API, and (2) the administrative overlay. Since the overlays patch got incredibly close, Angie and I are committed to having this as part of the final release. There is now a further exception for getting overlays in, and I encourage everyone to keep working on it as fast as possible.

Other than changes necessary for the overlay, and a few left-over patches that were ready by the 10/15 deadline, we have now entered the next phase of the code freeze: no more API changes and no additional features. At this point, we focus exclusively on usability, accessibility, and performance. (If a performance, accessibility, or usability patch requires an API change, webchick and I will make a decision on a patch by patch basis.) This current phase was originally said to be four weeks from API freeze, but we're extending it to six weeks instead. The new deadline is December 1st, instead of November 15th.

My guidance at this point: depending on your strengths, and how involved you've been with the various issues in the past, please devote some time to the overlay patch, to D7UX issues and Usability issues, to accessibility issues, or to performance-related issues. For the remaining five weeks, that's where the action is. Get involved now!

drupal.org's new pagerank: 9

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:54:51 -0700

It seems that Google update the toolbar (visible) pagerank. For drupal.org its was 8 and updated new value is 9. How can we make it 10 ? :)
Congratulations.

Bad experience with Binserver - warning to others

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:13:23 -0700

My experience with Binserver

I posted in late September my project for bid on Elance. I invited several programmers in order to get the best for the job. One of them was Binserver. Communications with Binserver had been okay in the start, perhaps a little dull on their part - I excused them because they might were busy with other jobs.

I asked several times whether they would be able to complete my site within a month, they themselves had suggested - I was told this was not a problem at all. I wanted the project done as a full escrow project - where the payment should decline in the end, when I and they are happy. The reason for this was that I repeatedly experienced poor communication and misunderstandings during other and this project.

The 5th October I assign Binserver my project on Elance. Then I heard nothing from them for several days - despite many emails, instant messages and even phone calls to their office. They never answer their phone, but you can leave message, and they say they will return to you quickly. They do so not always, and I've never experienced something similar when I've had to fight and beg for information and communication between a provider and me.

Fun times in IRC!

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:14:11 -0700

Ahh, you gotta love IRC. Allow me to share a short edited snippet. IP addresses have been removed as well as some comments by people that are not really relevant to the conversation. The best part are the /whois results.

I'm not in any way upset about this. I think this is funny, and felt like sharing.

[20:01] *** kinesis (n=k@xx.xx.xx.xx) joined
[20:01] drupal vs joomla and why
[20:03] kinesis http://www.whitehouse.gov/
[20:03] This is an IRC chat, not google.
[20:03] thats nice

Drupal data imports with Migrate and Table Wizard

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:38:15 -0700

If you haven't yet heard the buzz that's been building since Drupalcon DC in March about the fabulous Migrate and Table Wizard modules, written by the smarties at Cyrve, then here are a few questions for you:

Does the phrase "data migration" conjure up images of being repeatedly stabbed in the knee with a rusty fork? (which would of course be a far more enjoyable experience!)
Have you spent countless hours sifting through record after record of your clients' legacy data, pining for an easy way to catalog it all so you (and they!) can both tell what's really important to pull over?
Do you lose years off of your life every time you attempt a bulk migration, hoping for the best that there are no horrific bugs that need to be sorted out afterwards that you didn't catch in testing?
Have you had it up to here with having to go and find separate modules, each with totally different interfaces and levels of bugginess, for importing nodes, taxonomy, users, and so on?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then the Migrate and Table Wizard modules are for you! Read on to learn how they work and try a "hands on" example.

(Note: This article is written against the current -dev releases of both Table Wizard and Migrate, which will eventually become Migrate 6.x-1.0 and Table Wizard 6.x-1.2. Final screen shots may vary.)

Drupal Performance Tip: Block Visibility

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:07:40 -0700

This is something we hit a lot when doing performance analysis on very slow websites, so I figured I'd issue a public service announcement. :)

It's not uncommon in more complex themes to have many different block regions, and even dynamic regions that will only appear on certain pages or when viewing nodes of certain types. One very common use-case is to have both a page.tpl.php, and a page-front.tpl.php, each of which print out different regions, particularly for ads or promotions:

Defining block regions is super easy; simply add a couple lines in your theme's .info file:

regions[ad_top]        = Ad Top
regions[ad_bottom]     = Ad Bottom
regions[front_sidebar] = Front Sidebar
regions[sidebar_ad]    = Sidebar Ad
regions[content]       = Content
regions[feature_a]     = Feature A
regions[feature_b]     = Feature B
regions[feature_c]     = Feature C
regions[feature_d]     = Feature D

And then in your *.tpl.php file, wherever you want the region to appear, simply print out its machine-readable name:

<?php
 print $feature_a; 
?>

Don't want the blocks in the "Feature A" region to show up in page.tpl.php? No problem! Just don't print the region out there! Done! Right?

Bringing Drupal to the U.S. Government

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:19:11 -0700

We had a great week of on-site training at the Department of Commerce in Washington, DC last week. They've already launched recovery.commerce.gov in Drupal and they're currently in the process of rebuilding Commerce.gov as a Drupal site. We spent the week with their team making sure that they understood not only how to build and present a Drupal site, but also the benefits of the Drupal community. They're a smart bunch and it's always fun to watch the synapses sparking as people realize all of the ways that they can snap together Drupal's pieces to create interesting web functionality.

There seems to be quite a buzz around Drupal in the government and as the Commerce team walked around the building with Drupal books under their arms, they got lots of comments from people in other bureaus, saying, "Oh! Drupal! We're thinking about using Drupal." Word is starting to get around about Drupal as a great platform for government websites.

There was a lot of excitement in the Drupal community when Recovery.gov originally launched using Drupal. And while the site has since upped its budget, redesigned, and moved off of Drupal, I still think that this is a win for our humble CMS. The site was built quickly on Drupal and launched within one month of Obama taking office. Shortly after launch, the site was getting 3,000 hits per second! That's a huge amount of traffic for any website, not to mention one built so quickly.

Tiffany Farriss: Kemper Art Museum Site Launch

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:29:16 -0700

Evan Clossin

Palantir is proud to unveil the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum's latest masterpiece: their new Web site built in Drupal 6 with a design by Studio Blue. This comes on the heels of the new Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts site, which Palantir launched earlier this year.

Robert Douglass: Plans for DrupalCon Europe, 2010, 2011, have been ratified

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:09:55 -0700

Today was a big milestone for the Drupal Association and for the future of European DrupalCons. Over 70 people met in IRC for over two hours to discuss and ratify two documents which lay out the process by which we will select DrupalCon locations going forward, and how the production teams to run DrupalCon will be managed. These are the two documents:

If you belong to a local group somewhere in Europe and you want to see DrupalCon happen in your city, region, or country, read both of these documents carefully. The time for nominating locations is now open, you can read the exact details of how it is done via the links provided above. Nominations must be submitted before October 1. That means there are only six full days to work on proposals. Nominations are being taken for both 2010 and 2011. The nominations will be evaluated, as per the plans in the documents, by October 15. They then get submitted to the Drupal Association Board of Directors, who have to meet and ratify the suggestions.

The important point in all of this is the level of openness and transparancy that is being brought to the system. The Drupal Association is working hard to involve the community in decisions, and to have well defined proceses for making important decisions, like where DrupalCon is held. Today we had a great discourse, thoroughly discussed all of the points that were important to people, and came to nearly unanimous agreements about how things will be done. That is what makes Drupal a nice community to live in.

Drupal 6.14 and 5.20 released

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:45:03 -0700

Download Drupal 6.14
Download Drupal 5.20

Drupal 6.14 and 5.20, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download. Both releases fix some other smaller issues as well.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.

Gerhard Killesreiter: More computer power

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:47:38 -0700

The Drupal Association has used some of the money that it acquired thanks to the Drupal community and its sponsors to buy more computing power for the infrastructure that all services of drupal.org are hosted on.

Due to SUN's Startup essentials programme we were able to get their hardware at discounted prices and helped ourselves to three X4170s and one X2270. The X2270 will our join our pool of webservers, one X4170 will replace the CVS and mail server, the others will become database servers with 32GB each.

The machines have now arrived at our hosting party OSUOSL and will be put into service soon. The most important task is getting CVS migrated to a faster machine.

The other machines have been ordered in order to absorb some of the growth we have been experiencing over the past year. Drupal.org serves now about 30 Mio pages per month whereas it only served 20 Mio pages per month 1 year ago. Another reason was that we expect the redesign to require more resources and we want to be prepared for that.

We would like to thank all the members of the Drupal Association; your money makes it possible for the Drupal Association to facilitate the growth of the Drupal Community. If you are not a member, please become one now!

Below are some images provided by OSUOSL.

Attachment	Size
Big machine	254.28 KB
We eat RAM for breakfast!	205.92 KB
Smaller machine	261.14 KB

Dries Buytaert: DrupalCon Paris wrapup

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 02:57:57 -0700

I took a few days off from work to spend some time with my family -- I haven't had more than a 3 hour break in the last 4 weeks and was away from home during the weekends. DrupalCon Paris ended about 48 hours ago, so I'm sitting here with post-DrupalCon blues, staring at the waterfront, thinking about how fun and exciting the conference was. As usual, I wasn't able to attend more than a couple of sessions, but nothing beats talking to Drupal users and brainstorming together. And I talked to many Drupalistas ...

Looking back at DrupalCon Paris, it struck me that sometimes we can generate ideas faster when we work alone, and that sometimes creativity happens best in groups. The same is true for solving problems. The time leading up to the conference, the time at the conference, and the weeks after the conference provide a unique blend of individual and collective idea creation and problem solving that is so important for Drupal. Let's not underestimate that. I certainly value the retrospective that seems to be part of the post-DrupalCon blues (and the waterfront Mojitos that help fuel it).

With 850 Drupalistas attending DrupalCon Paris, I wasn't able to talk to all of you -- I feel sad about that because we have such an amazing community. To those people who I have been able to talk to and brainstorm with: thanks for inspiring me!

As always, DrupalCon is largely driven by volunteers, and many of them have a full-time job. It takes a lot to coordinate an event like this and it is not something we should take for granted. Everyone involved -- from the local volunteers to the Drupal Association to the event planning staff -- has my thanks! Great times!

CTools presentation slides and example code

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 01:27:06 -0700

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/merlinofchaos/the-chaos-tools-suite

This is the modal test module. You can create the .info file that goes with it.
<?php
/**
* Implementation of hook_menu().
*/
function modal_test_menu() {
$items = array();

$items['modal_test'] = array(
'title' => 'Modal test',
'access callback' => TRUE,
'page callback' => 'modal_test_page',
);

$items['modal_test/form'] = array(
'title' => 'AJAX modal dialog',
'access callback' => TRUE,
'page callback' => 'modal_test_popup',
'type' => MENU_CALLBACK,
);

Neil Drumm: Drupal.org redesign’s dashboard

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 21:05:18 -0700

An important part of the Drupal.org redesign is the dashboard. Power users have a towers of navigation, contributor, and/or documentation links on every page. That is clutter when you don’t need to jump to another section of the site. And one size does not fit all; there are a few options now, but either you turn on a block of links or you don’t.

The redesigned pages clean up the administrative clutter. You will be able to build your own, or keep the good defaults, dashboard to watch and get to what you care about. However, the content in the prototype is mostly positional. We need to design and build the widgets that are most useful for the Drupal community. We need to know what will help you be more productive on Drupal.org.

I started building out a dashboard module at the previous Drupal.org redesign sprints. But, it needs a lot more work. In addition to the issue queue, I made a wiki page to track priorities. I’ll be at DrupalCon Paris looking for people to help work on this important functionality.

By the way, the API.drupal.org work I wrote about, launched a few days ago. Thanks for all the testing and feedback. There are already a a few comments. There are still a lot of improvements needed, especially rewriting the parser. Find me if you want to help make more improvements.

Narayan Newton: Drupal.org Now With Caching

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:03:15 -0700

I'm going to be honest, I'm kind of obsessed with caching. Since becoming involved in web performance, it has pretty much taken over my life. Yes there is the mysql tuning, query profiling, solr deployments....but all in all 90% of my day is looking at hit rates of one form or another. Due to this, HTTP caching for drupal.org has been a mild obsession for me. This week my wish came very close to true.

An observation about Designers versus Developers

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 04:48:08 -0700

Apparently I've been sort of ignoring an increased friction between Drupal designers and developers the last few days. Not that I don't know it's there, I'm right up in the forefront of that friction, feeling fairly regularly told what to do by people who I feel aren't fully informed as to why I created things the way I did. And most often I don't react well to this, and I cause more friction than I really should. But this isn't just about me. That friction is there and it's all around.

Dries Buytaert: Drupal trademark policy officially available

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 01:45:21 -0700

Just a short time ago, I announced the refresh of Drupal.com. As I announced in my post, Drupal.com has a couple of purposes: one of its key purposes is serving as the current home of the official Drupal trademark policy. As of today, version 1.0 is available and published at http://drupal.com/trademark.

I invite you to read the Drupal Trademark Policy in detail. It's full of illustrative examples, and I hope that we've made it as community-friendly as possible. We can't cover every possible scenario, but I believe it addresses most situations that are likely to occur within our community. It may -- and certainly will -- change over time as we keep in sync with the changing needs of our community and, if necessary, to account for unforeseen situations. That is important to keep in mind.

I've owned the Drupal trademark for a long time. The lack of a Drupal trademark policy doesn't mean the trademark was unprotected -- it was protected by trademark law. The lack of a Drupal trademark policy meant that it was unclear what was allowed and what wasn't allowed, and frankly, that you were bound by trademark law. By creating a trademark policy and a licensing procedure, we've provided us options we did not have before.

The goal of our new policy is to provide guidance and clarity on how the Drupal trademark is allowed to be used. The only community model that really works is one where there is a fair-level playing ground for all people and organizations. Ultimately, that is what this policy seeks to accomplish.

The entire process of developing the policy was a community effort, with help from a variety of legal experts. We worked on the policy over the course of almost two years. A draft version of the policy was posted at http://groups.drupal.org/node/19068, and through the community feedback that developed there, we ironed out many of the wrinkles of my original draft. Larry Garfield, the Drupal Association's current legal representative has provided feedback, and both my own attorney (DLA Piper) and additional attorneys from the Software Freedom Law Center and the Drupal Association were part of the policy's development. To help validate our work, we reviewed other similar policies from sister projects to make sure that we were in-line with the current legal trends in open-source development.

As the owner of the trademark, protection of the trademark falls to me, and is managed by me with the assistance of my attorney, the Drupal Association, and potentially even local Drupal Associations. I personally bear substantial personal costs as part of sustaining the trademark in all its various geographic jurisdictions. To help offset the costs of managing the trademark, the trademark licenses, and to actively pursue those who infringe or inappropriately seek to use our brand, I will sell some advertising space on drupal.com and may also charge a small licensing fee to those that do not qualify for an automatic trademark license (section 1A) and that need to follow the license grant procedure (section 1B). Now the policy is published, I plan to work out the financial details in the next months so stay tuned for an update on that.

Most of you who use Drupal, commercially or otherwise, need not worry about how the new policy may impact you, though I certainly encourage you to study it and to apply for a license if required. For instance, in many cases, you are allowed to use the name 'Drupal' in domain names. Conversely, there are some Drupal domain names in particular that the policy seeks to protect for the good of the community and to create a fair-level playing ground. The introduction of the official policy is only intended to help ensure that the effort of hard-working Drupal contributors is not misappropriated. I think it will make us even stronger, as a community!

Off to Paris

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 10:58:23 -0700

Heading to the airport to go to Paris shortly. DrupalCon is Sep 1-5 and it'll be fun to see a bit of Paris before that.

For the next two weeks expect no or next to no activity from me in any of my issue queues. For a week or two after we come back, don't expect much better. Post-trip trauma is always fun.

Installing Memcached on RedHat or CentOS

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:21:18 -0700

Memcached is a service that allows entire database tables to be stored in memory, drastically speeding up queries to those tables and alleviating database load. In Drupal, the Memcached module allows you to store all cache tables in memory.

We've covered how to install Memcached before on Debian and on Mac OS X. But server software can vary significantly between sites, and this guide can be used to set up Memcached on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or CentOS, which are architecturally the same.

Install memcached through RPM

The easiest way to install Memcached is through a package manager such as yum or apt. However, Memcached is not available from the default collection of packages, so the first thing we need to do is add a new RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) server so that we can install Memcached through yum.

One of the best 3rd-party RPM servers is provided by Dag Wieers, which will provide us with up-to-date packages that are not provided by Red Hat directly. The one tricky part of setting up an RPM server is making sure you get the repository that matches your server version and architecture (32-bit or 64-bit). So we need to collect that information first.

From a shell prompt, get the CentOS/RedHat version number:


read more

Panels 3.0 and CTools 1.0 OFFICIAL released!

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:35:56 -0700

That's right. Panels 2 never managed to get a 2.0 release, it got caught up in rcs and brokenness that was unfixable. Panels 3, however, has managed to duck that curse, and it is now official. Panels 3 is released. It really needs CTools 1.0.

Panels 3.0: http://drupal.org/node/554226
CTools 1.0: http://drupal.org/node/554222

Panels 3 has seen radical changes since Panels 2, and is a great deal more powerful, easier to use and we think you will like it a lot.

Please understand that the upgrade from Panels 1 or 2 to Panels 3 is a little bumpy. Not everything upgrades perfectly. Some people have had to uninstall and reinstall to make it work. Some of the back and forth during the betas and rcs caused irreparably messed up data that does not carry forward properly. I apologize for this. BACK UP BEFORE YOU UPGRADE.. If you do not read these release notes, and do not back up, please do not post issues. =)

The best way to use Panels is to pair it with the Page Manager from the Chaos Tools Suite, and use its interface for creating panel pages. This completely replaces the Panels Pages module from Panels 2. If you used an earlier beta version, the Page Manager used to be known as delegator. If you are upgrading from Panels 2, and the CTools module is already in the tree but not enabled, it will be automatically enabled for you. This is the best way to upgrade from Panels 2. Please ensure that you are using CTools 1.0 alongside this, and not a beta version! Earlier versions of CTools will not work with Panels 3.0!

Page Manager introduces the concept of Variants which are different ways that a page can be displayed. For many uses, you will have only one variant. However, if you want a page to look different based upon the data being displayed (for example, you want story nodes displayed differently from article nodes), or permissions of the user (you may want an administrator to see something different from a regular user, or a logged in user to see something different from a logged out user) then you will add additional variants to a page. You will use the selection rules to determine which variant a user sees. Remember that the first variant that passes the selection rules will be used, so be sure to put the most specific rules first and the more general rules later. You can put a variant with no rules at all last and it will serve as a default.

There is a real need for tutorials, screencasts and documentation for this system to be written. It's at this point that I'm really looking to the community to provide help. My own motivation to write this stuff is fairly low, and I know there are writers out there who use this stuff who can help. Please participate! Documentation is a great way to give back to the community in return for software, and requires very little (sometimes no!) coding knowledge at all.

log4drupal now available on github

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 17:56:10 -0700

both the 5.x and 6.x versions are now available for download on github. sorry, i just can't do CVS anymore. to download:

start by going here: http://github.com/cailinanne/log4drupal
then click the all tags drop-down and choose the appropriate version
then click the download button

a full description of the module is available here

Learning JavaScript from PHP - a Comparison

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 08:49:28 -0700

This is a basic comparison between PHP and JavaScript. It's intended for users familiar with PHP and looking for JavaScript equivalents.

JavaScript and PHP Comparisons:

Variables
Objects and Arrays
Control Structures
- for() loop
- foreach() loop

Variables

Variable Scope

PHP and JavaScript take two very different approaches to declaring variables. In PHP, all variables are local in scope unless declared as global. JavaScript is opposite, and all variables are global unless declared with the var keyword.

Panels 3.0 / CTools 1.0 release imminent! Translators wanted!

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:36:38 -0700

This is a call to translators. If you're interested in translating Panels and or CTools, I am going to do a full release by the middle of next week. Any translation work you want to go out with this release should be checked into CVS by then!

Panels has only one translation and it's very old, so it is probably more or less useless. CTools has no translations at all (and I am not surprised by this).

My Aha! moments in Drupal theming

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 05:56:05 -0700

While at Drupalcamp Copenhagen I got into a few conversations about Drupal aha! moments, particularly around theming. After trying to talk in the abstract about the things that finally "clicked" for me when I was learning Drupal, I offered to write it up with some specifics. So, for my Danish buddies and any other curious Drupalers, these are my two biggest aha! moments that accelerated my Drupal theming ninja skills: "getting" the theme system and working with forms. I've already written about modifying forms and since "getting the theme system" is a big chunk, I'm going to focus just on that moment in this article.

Dries Buytaert: On Drupal certification programs

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:25:12 -0700

Every once in a while, the discussion of Drupal cerification comes up. Is a Drupal certification program a good thing or a bad thing? Are certification programs overrated? Isn't one's track record as a contributor on drupal.org the best measure of someone's past (and possibly future) performance? Should the Drupal Association manage the program, and if not, then who? What do other Open Source projects do?

Lots of unknowns and lots of subjective questions always make for a good discussion.

While I'm often skeptical about certification programs myself, I do see the value in them. Certification isn't for everyone but for some people it is valuable. A masters degree from MIT, an MBA from Harvard or a Ph.D. from Stanford is a form of certification too. But, just as there are good examples, there is no lack of examples where bad certification programs deliver certified engineers that don't know what they are actually doing. That fact, though, doesn't invalidate the valuable certification programs that do exist; for example, the CISCO certification program is very thorough and valued by the market. Similarly, I think that employers do value certificates achieved in higher education. All things considered, I believe there is value in having a well-executed high-quality Drupal certification program, especially as Drupal continues to grow.

My personal view is that the Drupal Association is not the best body to create "the" Drupal certification program. It is my belief that we are best served by allowing many organizations to create their own Drupal certification programs, and have the marketplace set their value -- similar to how universities build reputations. Competition around Drupal certification programs could be a great thing, because it would likely improve quality and allow for specialization. A certification, of course, is ultimately only as valuable as the organization standing behind it. In such a scenario, it is very important that the certification programs are labeled properly; that is, "ACME Drupal certified" rather than just "Drupal certified", where ACME is the name of the company or organization providing the service. It has to be ACME's reputation that is on the line for the quality of their participants. The Drupal trademark policy is designed to help achieve that.

I also don't believe that a certification program is a zero-sum game: that is, holding a certification doesn't imply that your track record on drupal.org (through your user profile) is of either less or more value. Again, the market and the buyer will determine the value of a drupal.org user profile versus a certification program versus a resume versus a portfolio versus degrees obtained through higher education. In any event, it is unlikely that one would hire someone solely on the basis of having a Drupal certification. I certainly wouldn't.

When we launched Acquia two years ago, we announced a Drupal certification program code named 'Yellow Jersey'. That program hasn't materialized yet, and we're not putting resources in it at this point in time. Building a high-quality certification program is a significant undertaking and we're not ready to take on such a program. And last but not least, the marketplace hasn't demanded these types of programs to a sufficient degree. Yet.

Other Open Source projects like MySQL, Zend, Linux, Ubuntu, RedHat, BSD all have certification programs so I think it is a matter of time before we see one or more Drupal certification programs emerge. Personally, I would support a well-executed high-quality Drupal certification program.

Hacking Views, Part 1: Basic Concepts

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 19:44:57 -0700

The 'Views' module is one of the mainstays of Drupal site building. It allows non-programmers to build highly customized listings of data that match certain criteria, then present that data in a variety of ways. A thumbnail gallery of photos, an alphabetized listing of site contributors, and a calendar display of upcoming events are all common applications of Views.

In this series of articles, we'll be taking a quick look at the architecture of the Views module and how its pieces work together; touring the different plug-in points that Views offers developers; and building a simple 'argument handler' for Views that demonstrates how the approach looks in the real world. A bit of knowledge about SQL will be useful for the article, as well as some understanding of object-oriented programming concepts like 'inheritance', but the code samples should be simple enough to tweak even if you're not a pro.

Under the hood, the pieces of a View can be divided into two different groups: the 'data' (stuff that affects the underlying database query that Drupal uses to retrieve the information for the View) and the 'presentation' (stuff that affects how that data is displayed to a user of the web site).

Buildin' SQL

The 'data' portions of the View are more numerous: they correspond roughly to the different pieces of a SQL 'SELECT' statement. That should come as no surprise -- at Views heart is a SQL query builder that turns all of your settings into a query against Drupal's database tables.

Creating Custom CCK Fields

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 04:09:38 -0700

You can create custom CCK fields, widgets, and formatters for any situation, but it can be hard to see how to do it. I finally found time to create an 'Example' module that creates a simple field, formatter, and widget, with lots of embedded documentation about what belongs where. You need to create three files, an .info file, an .install file, and the module itself. The code below creates a very simple textfield, but it can be used as a starting point for any custom module. I'm also attaching a .zip file with the contents of this custom module.

The .info File

; $Id$
name = Example field
description = Defines an example field type.
dependencies[] = content
package = CCK
core = 6.x

The .install File

<?php
// $Id$
// Notify CCK when this module is enabled, disabled, installed,
// and uninstalled so CCK can do any necessary preparation or cleanup.
/**
* @file
* Implementation of hook_install().
*/
function example_install() {
drupal_load('module', 'content');
content_notify('install', 'example');
}

/**
* Implementation of hook_uninstall().
*/
function example_uninstall() {
drupal_load('module', 'content');
content_notify('uninstall', 'example');
}

/**
* Implementation of hook_enable().
*
* Notify content module when this module is enabled.
*/
function example_enable() {
drupal_load('module', 'content');
content_notify('enable', 'example');
}

/**
* Implementation of hook_disable().
*
* Notify content module when this module is disabled.
*/

New Panels 3 UI screenshots

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:40:01 -0700

I spent the better part of a week doing nothing but this and sleep, but I think it's nearly ready. If you're brave, you can go get the current one out of CVS. I warn you, it'll be minorly annoying because I got rid of the delegator (What's that do?!) module and replaced it with the Page Manager (I bet you can guess what that does) module.

First, once you've got everything, if you go to admin/build/panels you'll see the Panels dashboard. It's really just an overlay over other stuff, because Panels itself doesn't really have a UI. But it gives UI to lots of other stuff.

Drupal booth at Hostingcon, Aug 10-12th, Washington, DC

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 23:59:53 -0700

The Drupal project will have a booth at Hostingcon, August 10-12th, in Washington, DC. This is the second year we will be at hostingcon meeting with members of the Drupal community and talking to hosting providers. The booth will be staffed by Eric Mandel, from Blackmesh hosting, members of the DC Drupal community, and Drupal hosting providers.

Hostingcon provides the Drupal community a great opportunity to help educate hosting providers about Drupal's popularity. Exciting web applications like Drupal, help drive hosting sales, so providers are eager to learn about what Drupal can do. The event also provides the Drupal community an opportunity to educate system administrators about Drupal hosting best practices such as security, performance tuning, scalability, and high availability.

We will also be doing a special 30 minute presentation in the presentation theater, on the expo floor. If you would like to attend that presentation or other Hostingcon sessions you can get a special discount on early bird registration using the code "Drupal2009". Early bird registration ends tomorrow. You can read about the Keynotes and Sessions here.

If you are interested in helping with the Drupal booth, you can register here.

The Great Pretender: Making your data act like a field

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:50:23 -0700

These days, almost every major Drupal site is using CCK, the module that lets you add custom fields to any content type. Among other things, CCK lets administrators rearrange a node type's contents using a simple drag and drop interface. In the past, this only worked for fields that CCK itself managed. If you worked with a custom module that altered a node's content, it was up to you to manage its position in the node content.

Now, though, it's possible for any module to tie into CCK's field management page to control the positioning of custom content. The key is hook_content_extra_fields(), and in this article we'll show you how to use it.

Drupocalypse Now (or, dangerous integer handling in drupal_write_record)

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:45:06 -0700

A couple of weeks ago, Twitter started circulating news about the upcoming Twitpocalypse. The easy 'default' storage format numbers in many programming languages and databases is the 'signed integer.' It's usually capable of representing values from -2,147,483,647 to +2,147,483,647. As fate would have it, the number of Twitter messages in existence was nearing that limit, and any developers who'd built software that stored tweets would encounter errors unless they started using larger number formats to store Twitter IDs.

Drupal's Twitter module (which James Walker and I co-maintain) had that problem: it archived Twitter statuses in the database, and it saved the Twitter IDs as signed integers. We released an update several weeks ago that changed the database column to an "unsigned bigint," capable of holding numbers as high as 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. Disaster averted!

Not Quite

When the big day arrived and Twitter Status ID 2,147,483,647 was finally posted, we started getting sporadic bug reports from users despite the fix we'd put in place. Even Sony Music, one of Lullabot's Twitter-using clients, got reports from their artists. Chris Daughtry's tweets weren't updating on his web site, and social media starvation was starting to set in. Time for some debugging!

2009 Budget

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 08:05:04 -0700

After months of hard work defining goals, getting price quotes, setting priorities and building working teams the Association is ready to announce our 2009 budget. The Association is an all volunteer ran organization made up of and supported by the Drupal community and is excited to share our budget with the community. We want to keep you informed as to how your donations are being used.

Download the PDF, read the summary below and if you see a project or area that you are interested in contact us and get involved. The Association is always looking for talented community members to help us with managing the hardware infrastructure of *.drupal.org, legal issues, accounting items, marketing, copyright and trademark issues, and many other tasks.

Budget Summary

For the calendar year 2009 the Associations expects the following in revenue and expenses.

Project revenues	USD	EURO
Recurring annual revenues	133,314	99,541
Current unexpected revenue (mainly Drupalcon)	161,875	120,776

Cash in bank	119,798	89,382
Total Revenues & Assets	415,087	309,699
Expected recurring expenses
Infrastructure	26,264	19,596
Administrative	16,892	12,604
Drupalcamp sponsorship	10,800	8,058
Drupalcon	80,000	59,689
Drupal store	5,000	3,731
Drupal meetup support	5,000	3,731
Legal	27,000	20,145
Public Relations	14,525	10,387
One-time expenses
Completion of d.o redesign	39,337	29,349
Drupal.org upgrades	40,250	30,031
Capacity upgrades to d.o	28,200	21,040
Creation of a Drupal store	8,500	6,342
U.S non-profit exploration	5,000	3,731
Conference collateral	8,254	6,158
Total one-time expenses	129,541	96,651
Total Expenses	315,022	235,040

Questions? Want more detail?
Download the PDF for more information.

You may be wondering the following...

Why is the budget being released in June?

The Association's fiscal year end is December 31st so this budget is a bit strange and you could say that it is released late. As this is our first official budget we started the process late in the year after the new permanent and board members were elected and officially accepted in their roles. The budget process started at Drupalcon D.C in March, 2009 and ended in June, 2009. This budget is a based on a full calendar year as if it had been created in January. In late October the Association will begin the second budgeting process for the full calendar year of 2010. As this budget covers a full year it is highly probable and expected that many of these initiatives will be carried over into the 2010 budget. Ongoing the Association will maintain a year long budget released near the beginning of each year.

It should be noted that some of the items outlined in this budget have already been raised/spent.

How should you interpret this budget?
The budget is the guide for the Association. It helps to determine the goals, priorities and sets guidelines to gauge the effectiveness of the Association's efforts. This budget is a reflection of how the Associations intends to accomplish its mission.

Infrastructure purchases such as new database and mail servers to support the growth across *.drupal.org, hiring of lawyers to protect the Drupal trademark/copyright and to pursue GPL violations, and attendance at conferences to help spread the word about Drupal are just some of the initiatives of the Association. If you don't see something in this budget that you believe the Association should be addressing get involved by contacting the Association and consider becoming a member or joining one of the working groups.

Accounting, purchases and financial transparency
The Association is working hard to provide financial transparency. This budget is a list of expectations but not the actual purchases, expenses or revenue generations. Of course it is expected that revenues and expenses closely follow the budget but this is not always the case. We are working with our accountants to provide periodic updates of our accounting so that it is clear how the money is actually raised and spent. When these are available they will be posted.

Still have questions?

Post in the comments or contact us for more information.

Announcing Our Latest Video: Advanced Theming for Drupal

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:06:05 -0700

We're proud to announce the fifth video in the Lullabot Learning Series. Advanced Theming for Drupal, which picks up where the Drupal Theming Basics video lets off.

Here's the description:
The Lullabot Learning Series continues with an in-depth look at the advanced features of Drupal's theming system. In this 2-hour video Nate Haug, Jeff Robbins, and James Walker explain how to completely control the HTML markup Drupal generates. You'll learn how to modify and add variables sent to Drupal's template files and how to use the Theme Developer Tool to simplify the task of working with and navigating Drupal's complex theme system.

The video includes a crash course through PHP, then dives into advanced theming concepts with practical examples such as: how to theme forms, how to cleanly expose information to the theme system, and how to empower your site administrators by making certain parts of the theme available to them for customization. Lastly, the team covers security best practices on shows how to best sanitize user-submitted data and prevent security exploits.

This video completely implements our freely available 960 Robots theme, and gives you the tools you need to make your Drupal site no longer look like a Drupal site.

You can read the full description on store.lullabot.com.

In the following free sample chapter from the video, Nate Haug gives an overview of the template.php file and sets the stage for the specific examples that are provided throughout the course of the video:

The download version of Advanced Theming for Drupal is available right now in our store. You can find out more information and see another sample video that gives an overview of everything that's covered.

One minor clarification on yesterday's post

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:19:09 -0700

I turned off comments on yesterday's post because it doesn't need to turn into a flame-war or a love-fest, and I apologize to all who feel the burning need to comment and cannot. I'll go ahead and leave comments on this post open, but I will aggressively delete comments that bait, flame, or are simply "I love you, man" comments. I'm not looking for flames, nor an ego-boost here. I've got a gripe and I needed to get that off my chest or I would continue burning with it for days.

Views, Panels, economy of front end code, and classes and namespace

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:32:18 -0700

I'm pretty impressed at all the excitement coming out of the whole design4drupal initiative. Lots of people are talking, and the chatter is everywhere. Unfortunately, from my perspective, it's looking like it may actually turn out to be one of the most damaging things that can happen to Drupal, and this one is bothering me at a very deep level. And perhaps this is something that's been building up, because I have definitely noticed my enthusiasm waning over the last year, and things like this are really putting a bullet into the heart of it.

5-Step Drupal Distributions

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:00:44 -0700

Distribution? Eh? What's That?

We all love Drupal because it can do anything from a simple personal blog, to a complex social networking site with all the trimmings, and more! Of course, there's a lot of work that goes into making a really polished Drupal site, not the least of which is lots and lots of configuration: deciding which modules to use, enabling them all (and all of their dependencies), setting up your basic CCK types and views, configuring all of the settings on your site just so, and sometimes adding bits of glue code to make it all flow smoothly.

In version 5, Drupal added Installation Profiles (sometimes also confusingly called distribution profiles) to its list of features. An installation profile is basically nothing more than a list of required modules and a variety of configuration code which gets performed during installation to give Drupal a bit more oomph out of the box.

A "distribution" of Drupal is one or more installation profiles included with Drupal itself and all of the required modules. Distributions can either be offered as a convenience to site builders by bundling together frequently used components, such as Acquia Drupal, or they can be used to offer a version of Drupal specifically targeted to a unique use case, such as Open Publish. Dries has some heavy things to think about for anyone interested in getting into the distribution business, so I'll pause for a moment while you go and read that link.

Back? Great! So you've decided you want to share your ultimate Drupal site for whatever reason, and you want to do it in the fastest way possible. Then this article is for you!

Drupal Theming: The Code Behind the Videos

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:59:12 -0700

One of the best ways that we've found to learn Drupal is to look at a finished site. Drupal's out-of-the-box experience doesn't really show its full potential. In our latest Drupal theming videos, we needed to build a complete website in order to provide content to "fill out" the theme being built. Once we finished that site, we thought that video viewers and others might like to be able get access and try it out for themselves. So we've done two things with the code:

We've uploaded the code and database to http://960robots.lullabot.com to act as a demonstration of the 960 Robots theme the we built in the videos. This is more for people to look at the front end and HTML output. We've disabled commenting and account registrations in order to keep the site in tact.
We've also bundled up all of the code (modules, core files, etc) along with the database dump and created a installation profile which you can download here and install just like you would install Drupal core.
UPDATE: We've also made available the original HTML template files with associated javascript & images so that you can follow along with the Theming Basics video.

Is This The Long-Awaited Lullabot Drupal Distribution?

Views 3.x roadmap

Fri, 29 May 2009 10:41:20 -0700

I've spent a lot of my 'between' time thinking about what I want to see for the next major revisions of Views, and I've finally decided to sit down and actually create a road map. Views 3 isn't like Views 2 in the sense that there will be a rewrite. On the contrary, I'm really happy with the foundation of Views 2 and I believe that we have a solid system for building on. What I'm unhappy with are features that got left out, or that I didn't even know we would need.

Announcing Our Latest Video: Theming Basics for Drupal

Tue, 26 May 2009 13:28:41 -0700

We're proud to announce the fourth video in the Lullabot Learning Series. Theming Basics for Drupal covers, as you might guess, all of the basics of Drupal theming. Here's the description:

The Lullabot Learning Series continues with a hands-on look at Drupal's theming system. In this 2 hour and 44 minute long in-depth video guide, Nate Haug, Jeff Robbins, and James Walker explain the steps for translating a web design into a Drupal theme. The video explains Drupal's design vernacular, concepts, and special needs. The team shows how to associate the proper CSS & Javascript files, add all of the necessary regions, and control the HTML output through page and node-specific templates. You'll learn about the best tools and strategies for controling the look and feel of your Drupal website. This video covers the basics of Drupal theming. Drupal's more complex theming topics are covered in the Advanced Theming video (to be released soon) which pairs with this video and finishes the complete implementation of the 960 Robots theme used in both videos.

Read the full description on store.lullabot.com.

In this free sample chapter from the video, Jeff Robbins demonstrates the Devel module's Theme Developer tool:

The download version of Theming Basics for Drupal costs $75 is available right now in our store.

Free Drupal CCK & Views Video Chapters

Wed, 20 May 2009 08:06:12 -0700

We've had many requests for sample videos from the Lullabot Learning Series. We decided to post an entire chapter from each video. We tried to pick a chapter that was full of useful information on its own and we placed them on both YouTube and Blip, so feel free to spread them around and embed them on your favorite web page.

Hope you enjoy these videos!

Learning CCK for Drupal

In Learning CCK, Jeff Eaton, Nate Haug, and James Walker show everything from CCK basics such as adding and displaying fields to more advanced topics such as CCK’s database storage mechanisms, field-level permissions, and how to theme CCK’s output. Each chapter of this video builds upon the last as the team builds and configures the content types for a university job board. This video pairs well with Learning Views, which continues this job board project through to completion.

Chapter 3: Adding a CCK field

Turn over in the Drupal association board and general assembly

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:18:43 -0700

A few weeks ago a community member raised concern on the consulting list about turn over in the Drupal association, or rather the lack of it. Since this information is often public, but hard to track down, I thought I'd shed some light.

Ten people have rotated on and off the board of the Drupal
association. Only four original board members are still present.
The board has two new members as of 2009 for the Drupal association, who were not previously permanent members of the association: Tiffany Farriss and Cary Gordon.

The association has 30 permanent members up from 15 elected permanent members in it's first year.

2006 - Zack, Moshe, Boris left the board and are still General assembly members. Steven Wittens and Dries Knapen were on the original board and have since resigned from the Drupal association.
2007 - Jeff Eaton, Bert Boerland were on the second board but are now members of the General Assembly.

Current directors from the original board: Dries has been re-elected as president. Gerhard has remained manager of infrastructure. Kieran has changed from fund raiser to business development. Angela has changed from director to Secretary. Four of the original nine directors are still on the board.

To learn more about about the members of the Drupal association our staff page.

Drupal Charting

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:41:55 -0700

I needed to find a way to create nice charts from Views data so that end users could adapt them to selected date ranges or categories, but I found that this is not as easy as it ought to be. It took quite a bit of time just to figure out what the options were, let alone decide which were the most promising solutions for my situation. Since this turned into such a time-consuming project, I've documented the steps I took and what I found to make things easier for anyone else looking for solutions like this.

I investigated several Drupal 6x modules to see which ones might be ready for prime time. Many of the modules have alpha releases or less and/or have dependencies on other modules that are alpha or beta (i.e. Views Charts (alpha) depends on SWF Object API (beta), several of the modules depend on the Charts module (alpha)). Several are brand new modules with no activity beyond the initial check in. Because of that, I used the latest development version of each module in my testing to be sure I had the latest code with all fixes applied.

The Buzzr Demo Video - Making Drupal Usable

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:49:34 -0700

A few weeks ago, I put together an April Fool's Day post about a bunch of usability work that Lullabot had been doing with Drupal. My favorite April 1 posts are usually heavily based in reality, and, as we've mentioned previously, Lullabot has, in fact, been doing a lot of work trying to create a streamlined version of Drupal.

We started our project about a year ago, working with Karen McGrane from Bond Art + Science heading up our user experience work and Ed Sussman coordinating all of the business aspects of the project. We spent about 8 months building a prototype and started fund raising a little over 4 months ago. Having done all of this work on spec, and since it's still in flux, we were hesitant to share it publicly during our ongoing V.C. meetings. But as we've been watching the great usability work that Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt have been doing for Drupal 7, we've found that they're struggling with a lot of same issues that we have, and even starting to solve them in the same ways.

So rather than playing it conservatively and keeping our work hidden, we've decided to unveil it to the world and contribute our thinking to the usability discussion. Our project, now called Buzzr, is still moving forward and there are many more features and ideas that we are working on. But I've made this video to highlight many of our usability ideas and show how they were implemented... no joke!

Enjoy.

Introduction to Calais

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:28:22 -0700

Calais? I get e-mail about that at least 12,238 times a day. Buzz off.

No, not Cialis, silly... Calais (pronounced cull-AY). It's a free (as in cost) natural language processing, rich semantic metadata, web service, uh... thingy. The video on the front page is jargon-tastic for those into that sort of thing. But to cut to the chase, it basically reads in text from your site and, based on the bazillions of others sites' text from other people using the service, it figures out some sensible tags for you automatically so your editors don't have to do it.

However, rather than just being a simple flat set of free tags, the tags are instead grouped into areas analogous to Drupal's taxonomy vocabularies which are associated with "Entities" (People, Companies, Cities, etc.), "Facts" (a person's Position or relationships between entities), and "Events" (Sporting, ManagementChange, etc.). The format passed back is in an open, semantic web-compatible format (Resource Description Framework or RDF) which then allows you to form intelligent relationships between articles based on the subject matter. This can be used for things like assisting with SEO, getting better search results, creating an "Other articles like this" block, pulling in external data from other sources that speak RDF, or whatever else you can imagine doing with this kind of information.

How does it work?

To get an idea of how it works, chuck some text at http://viewer.opencalais.com/. For example, here's a Wikinews teaser about President Obama:

It correctly identifies the topic of the article as "Politics," "Washington,United States" as a "City" that the article is about, "Barack Obama" and "George W. Bush" as "Person" entities, and even finds a quotation by George W. Bush (though sadly, not as entertaining as some). Pretty nifty!

So, wanna wire this up with Drupal? Let's find out how!

log4drupal - an updated logging api for drupal 6

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:00:35 -0700

drupal 6 included an upgrade to the built in logging functionality (watchdog). drupal 6 exposes a new hook, hook_watchdog which modules may implement to log Drupal events to custom destinations. it also includes two implementations, the dblog module which logs to the watchdog table, and the syslog module which logs to syslog.

with these upgrades, log4drupal is less critical addition to a drupal install, and i hesitated before providing a drupal 6 upgrade. however, eventually i decided that log4drupal is still a useful addition to a drupal development environment as log4drupal provides the following features still not provided by the upgraded drupal 6 watchdog implementation :

a java-style stacktrace including file and line numbers, showing the path of execution
automatic recursive printing of all variables passed to the log methods
ability to change the logging level on the fly

in addition, the drupal 6 version of log4drupal includes the following upgrades from the drupal 5 version

all messages sent to the watchdog method are also output via log4drupal
severity levels have been expanded to confirm to RFC 3164
log module now loaded during the drupal bootstrap phase so that messages may be added within hook_boot implementations.

you may download the drupal 6 version here. see below for general information on what this module is about and how it works.

easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy drupal 6 installation on debian linux

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:48:14 -0700

installing drupal is pretty easy, but it's even easier if you have a step by step guide. i've written one that will produce a basic working configuration with drupal6 on debian lenny with php5, mysql5 and apache2.

all commands that follow assume that you are the root user.

let's get started!

Submit ideas for Drupal Association website

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 02:09:06 -0700

Now that the Drupal.org redesign is underway, Neil Drumm is currently collecting suggestions for what a revamped Drupal Association website might look like.

Angela Byron is collecting feedback and opinions from the Drupal community at http://webchick.net/node/58. Please post comments/opinions!

Drupal.org infrastructure status and growth presentation

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:14:32 -0700

Narayan Newton and I gave a talk at Drupalcon on the state of the http://drupal.org infrastructure. Narayan, Gerhard, David, and myself are currently working on a infrastructure budget proposal for the Drupal association. This proposal will give you some insight into the challenges of running Drupal.org and why it is not just another Drupal site. In fact, our use of Drupal as a web application platform for Drupal.org pushes the Drupal project in many directions that lead to innovation.

Drupal's participation in Google Summer of Code 2009

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:26:22 -0800

For the last several years, Angie Byron (aka webchick) has done an outstanding job coordinating Drupal's participation in the Google Summer of Code program. This year, however, Angie has the additional responsibility of being a core maintainer for Drupal 7.

Earlier this year, Angie put out a post asking for help in the Summer of Code 2009. Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg responded, and has been working with other members of the community to prepare for SoC 2009.

So this year, Alex will be Drupal's "organization administrator," or point person within the community for the SoC. In this role, Alex will have a number of duties, and will need your help!

In his role as organization administrator, Alex will be the go-to person for:

Turning in our mentoring organization application so that we can participate in Summer of Code
Wrangling the community to come up with mentors, project ideas, application voting, etc.
Handling any "official" communications with Google
Tracking student and mentor progress over the course of the program
General cat-herding :)

Alex will be supported by members within the Drupal Association, including Robert Douglass (main point of contact), Bill Fitzgerald, and Angela Byron.

But with that said: the SoC has been successful within the Drupal community because of community involvement, aka you! To participate in this year's SoC, join the SoC 2009 group. If you work within a Drupal shop, consider mentoring a proposal. If you are active within your local Drupal User's Group, talk the program up at your next meeting. If you have an idea for the Next Great Killer Module (tm), write up the spec and submit it as a proposal. And if you are a student and want to get involved, come on in!

And who knows? Maybe this year's SoC will bring us the next webchick...

Security Newsletter unsubscription message

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:04:05 -0800

Dear Security Newsletter subscribers,

We have recently performed testing on the subscription infrastructure. As a result you might have received a message that you were unsubscribed from the security newsletter.

There is no action required on your part, you are still subscribed.

Sending the message was unintentional. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Regards,

The Drupal.org infrastructure team

Note: The "My newsletters" page on user profiles has been temporarily disabled to prevent overloading the mailinglist server.

BeautyTips 0.9 Release

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 06:50:07 -0800

I've just released the new version of BeautyTips (0.9). New features include:

A demo page - The new demo page provides lots of documentation and examples for BeautyTips. The demos include examples which emulate some famous javascript popup balloons from around the web. There are currently examples emulating popups from Google Maps, Netflix, and Facebook. The demo page also has some tricky (and a little experimental) "live" javascript fields so developers can experiment with different options and see how the BeautyTips are affected.
Ajax content - Content can now come from other pages on your site*. The ajax argument takes not only a URL, but also an optional jQuery selector. This means that you can use just part of an existing page as the content of your BeautyTip. The Do It With Drupal video page is a great example of this. Just roll over the thumbnail images to see it in action.
Click-anywhere-to-close - This default behavior means that any open BeautyTips will be closed whenever the visitor clicks anywhere in the body of the page (outside of the tip or target elements).
Close-when-others-open - This option (normally disabled) can ensure that only one tip is open at a time.
bgiframe plugin support - IE has (yet another) goofy behavior where form elements don't seem to respect z-indexes. If you're having this problem, simply include the bgiframe plugin on your page and BeautyTips will recognize it and use it.
hoverIntent plugin support - hoverIntent is a great jQuery plugin which attempts to determine if a user intends to be hovering over (or out of) an element before the hover event is fired. It has configurations for how long to wait before trigering the 'over' and 'out' functions. Check out the BeautyTips demo page to see how this works.
activeClass on target elements - Whenever an element has an active BeautyTip, it gets the "bt-active" class. This class-name can be changed globally or locally using the options arguments. Example
Changed jQuery.fn.bt.defaults to jQuery.bt.defaults - Just a code cleanup thing. This may affect people with existing implementations of BeautyTips. Just remove the "fn" from your global option overrides.
Changed "titleSelector" option to "contentSelector" - Just for clarity. Again, if you've got an existing implementation, just do a search and replace.

* For security reasons, most browsers will not allow cross-domain html calls. You will get a security error if you try this.

Awesome! Where do I get it?

You can download from the BeautyTips plugin page on jQuery.com. That's also where you should submit any bugs or feature requests.

using google analytics advanced segments to separate direct and organic traffic

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:03:39 -0800

traffic to a website can be divided into four major sources : direct, paid, organic and referrals. unsurprisingly, google analytics segments the traffic sources reports accordingly.

there is, however, a small catch. the ever growing popularity of search engines has led to an odd use case : users who use a search engine to search for exactly your domain name, instead of simply typing www.mydomain.com into their web browser. these users have just reached your site via an "organic search" and google analytics will classify them accordingly.

technically this is correct, but semantically it's troubling. the users who have reached your site by typing "mydomain" into Google have far more in common with the users that entered www.mydomain.com into their URL bar and far less in common with those users that reached your site by typing "my optimized search term" into Google. and the population of these users is not small - on one of the commercial drupal sites that i maintain these "mydomain" Google searchers account for over one third of the supposedly organic traffic.

before the release of google analytics advanced segments, one could estimate the volume of "True Organic" pageviews by starting with the organic search volume, then using the keyword report to subtract all the "mydomain" keywords (mydomain, mydomain.com, and, my personal favorite www.mydomain.com).

thankfully, advanced segments now gives us an easy way to create a "True Direct" and "True Organic" segment - in which all the "mydomain" organic searches have been removed from the organic segment, and stuck in the direct segment instead.

stokereport.com : drupal powered web 2.0 site for surfers

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:03:52 -0800

recently launched, stokereport.com is starting to make waves in the san francisco surfing community, as the first san francisco surf report website powered by user-generated content

powered by drupal 5.3 under the hood, stokereport is web 2.0 to the core. all content is user-generated, and users may submit reports via SMS, Twitter, mobile web or a traditional web browser. users may post pictures with their report, and vote for their favourites. this feature that has quickly led to a great collection of san francisco surf pics

stokereport is also a bit of a "mash-up" - combining data from the national weather service, weather underground, noaa and other regional weather services to provide current and forecast conditions for swell, wind and temperature.

and finally, if you can't quite get motivated to get in the water yourself, but still like to dream, check out stokereport's user-submitted "rants" - a great collection of news, videos and offbeat fun from the world of surfing.

Making Attachments Appear Across Translations

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:48:05 -0800

Drupal 6 supports translation of content with the core Content Translation module. So you can create a page in English, then translate the page to Dutch.

But what if you attach a file to the English page? It does not show up on your Dutch translation. And what if you are using CCK and FileField? That's the case that I want to cover in this article.

First, I installed Drupal 6.6, enabled the Locale module, and added the Dutch translation (for the proper way of installing translations, see Addison Berry's screencast, Installing Drupal with a Translation).

I installed CCK 6.x-2.1 and enabled the Content module and some others (Node Reference, Number, Text, Option Widgets).

I installed the 6.x3.x-dev snapshot of FileField (it's better to use an actual release but I saw some bug fixes going into the module and figured I'd test it). I enabled FileField module.

I enabled the core Content Translation module.

Then I installed i18n 6.x-1.0-BETA6, which is the latest release of the Internationalization Module. I enabled the Internationalization and Synchronize Translations modules.

I needed a CCK content type to test with so I created one:

Solving the permission denied error when updating Drupal via CVS

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 08:35:29 -0700

If you update Drupal via cvs by doing the following kind of command (here I am updating a Drupal 6.4 installation to Drupal 6.5):

$ cvs update -dP -r DRUPAL-6-5

you might run into the following error:

...
cvs update: Updating scripts
cvs update: Updating sites
cvs update: Updating sites/all
cvs update: Updating sites/default
P sites/default/default.settings.php
cvs [update aborted]: cannot open .new.oxI8ko: Permission denied

The update is aborting because the cvs program does not have permission to create a temporary file in the sites/default directory of your Drupal installation. Notice there's no "w" in the permissions for the "default" directory:

$ ls -l sites/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  6 jvandyk  staff  204 Oct 22 10:07 CVS
drwxr-xr-x  4 jvandyk  staff  136 Oct 22 09:18 all
dr-xr-xr-x  6 jvandyk  staff  204 Oct 22 09:20 default

So the solution is to give write access temporarily to the user running cvs, then take it away again after the update:

$ chmod u+w sites/default
$ cvs update -dP -r DRUPAL-6-5
...
cvs update: Updating scripts
cvs update: Updating sites
cvs update: Updating sites/all
U sites/all/README.txt
cvs update: Updating sites/default
U sites/default/default.settings.php
cvs update: Updating themes
...
[cvs proceeds with no errors]
$ chmod u-w sites/default

The chmod u+w command means "give the user who owns this file write permission" and chmod u-w means "take write permission away from the user who owns the file."

Announcing BeautyTips, a jQuery Tooltip Plugin

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 09:33:51 -0700

[update: This is the initial release announcement of BeautyTips. However, there's a newer version that's been released since. To download the latest version of the module, go here.]

[update II: There is now a project page for BeautyTips at jQuery.com. If you have bug reports or support requests please post them to the BeautyTips issue queue. I cannot manage issues through the comments on this post.]

Well I've done it! I've written my first jQuery plugin. The plugin creates rollover balloon-help style tooltips for any element on your page. While there were a few different tool tips plugins that existed for jQuery, none of them seemed to quite meet my need for a NetFlix (or Google Maps) style talk-balloon popup.

It quickly became apparent that in order to accomplish this type of flexible talk-balloon tooltips, I was going to need to engage the use the HTML 5 canvas element (and a lot of high-school algebra and trigonometry). The result is BeautyTips, a flexible and smart tooltip which calculates the best position for each tooltip bubble and then draws it. Bubbles can have rounded corners with a variable corner radius, "spike" length, color, opacity, and much more.

BeautyTips in action on DoItWithDrupal.com

The canvas element is supported in modern versions of Firefox, Safari, and Opera. However, Internet Explorer needs a separate library called ExplorerCanvas included on the page in order to support canvas drawing functions. ExplorerCanvas was created by Google for use with Google Maps and several of their other web apps. Include it on the page according to the readme file and BeautyTips should work just fine in IE.

Beauty Tips was written to be simple to use and pretty. All of its options are documented at the bottom of the jquery.bt.js file and defaults can be overwritten globally for the entire page, or individually on each call.

Drupal, duplicate content, and you

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 07:00:00 -0700

Does Google's "duplicate content penalty" harm Drupal sites? No! Here's why.

For years, Drupal has enjoyed a solid reputation as a search engine friendly CMS. It generates relatively clean, standards-compliant HTML out of the box; syncs up the important TITLE tag with semantically useful H1 and H2 tags in the body of each page; and provides short, human-readable URLs with plentiful options for customization. (Anecdotal evidence: several years back, I wrote a post on my Drupal-powered blog that mentioned the name of the company I worked for. Within two weeks, my blog post ranked higher than the company's own web site on Google.)

Recently, I've witnessed a number of discussions where people expressed concern about the way Drupal generates the human-readable URLs that help make it Google-friendly. In particular, they were worried about Google's dreaded Duplicate Content Penalty, a system designed to keep spammers from flooding Google with the same content at dozens (or hundreds!) of URLs. There's a lot of confusion floating around, so for the geeks in the crowd (and the not-so-geeky interested in learning how things work behind the scenes), I thought it would be useful to give a guided tour of how Drupal manages and generates URLs.

amazon release their elastic block store, ebs

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:42:33 -0700

a while ago i posted some performance benchmarks for drupal running on a variety of servers in amazon's elastic compute cloud.

amazon have just released ebs, the final piece of technology that makes their ec2 platform really viable for running lamp stacks stuck as drupal.

ebs, the "elastic block store", provides sophisticated storage for your database instance, with features including:

high io throughput
data replication
large storage capacity
hot backups using snapshots
instance type portability e.g. quickly swapping your database hardware for a bigger machine.

"Classic" Web Problems, Solved

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:15:52 -0700

A lot of energy in the Drupal world goes towards solving complex problems: giving administrators ways to build publishing workflows without writing code, integrating with cool new APIs, automatically translating site content into Klingon... You know. The usual.

With all of that energy focused on complex architectural problems, it's easy to lose sight of the simple solutions that Drupal provides for really common "classic" web problems. This really hit home the other week as I sifted through an old Zip disk with archives of sites I'd built for clients in the heady days of the late 90s. One by one, I started ticking off requests my clients had made that today's site-builders can solve in minutes with Drupal modules -- no wacky configuration, no complicated recipes. Just a simple, "Yes!" when a client says, "Can you...?"

How to get your news and annoucement post promoted to the front page of Drupal.org

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:33:05 -0700

Use these guidelines when deciding whether a post should be promoted to the front page.
Guidelines for promoting and demoting content to the front page
Front Page Schedule

Beginning with Drupal 6 and PostgreSQL on OS X 10.5 Leopard

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 11:13:53 -0700

PostgreSQL (often called Postgres) is the Other Major Database for Drupal. It has one of the same strange characteristics that Drupal does: its adherents swear that it is the best thing since sliced bread. In this article, we'll examine how to get PostgreSQL installed, then get a Drupal 6 installation running on top of it.

Assumptions: XCode Tools from your Mac OS X DVD (also available from Apple Developer Connection) are installed. Your copy of PHP has support for Postgres (I used MAMP and it worked out of the box).

lamp on amazon ec2 shaping up nicely

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:02:46 -0700

recently i posted some encouraging performance benchmarks for drupal running on a variety of servers in amazon's elastic compute cloud. while the performance was encouraging, the suitability of this environment for running lamp stacks was not. ec2 had some fundamental issues including a lack of static ip addresses and no viable persistent storage mechanism.

amazon are quickly rectifying these problems, and recently announced elasic ip addresses; a "static" ip address that you own and can dynamically point at any of your instances.

today amazon indicated that persistent storage will soon be available.

zicasso launches drupal-powered web2.0 travel site

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 21:07:15 -0700

three weeks ago, zicasso.com launched a drupal-powered free personalized online travel service that aims to connect travelers to a global network of quality, pre-screened travel companies. unlike many internet travel sites which provide cheap fares or packages, zicasso is targeted for busy, discerning travelers who want to plan and book complex trips (the ones with multiple destination stops or activities).

zicasso was favorably reviewed in popular web publications including; pc magazine, techcrunch, ars technica and the san jose business journal.

zicasso chose to build their application using the open-source cms system, drupal to leverage the wide array of web2.0 functionality provided by the open source community.

the application was rapidly constructed by a small development team led by cailin nelson and jenny dickinson. the team took advantage of "core" drupal modules including cck, panels, views, imagecache, workflow and actions.

lamp performance on the elastic compute cloud: benchmarking drupal on amazon ec2

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 05:54:48 -0800

amazon's elastic compute cloud, "ec2", provides a flexible and scalable hosting option for applications. while ec2 is not inherently suited for running application stacks with relational databases such as lamp, it does provide many advantages over traditional hosting solutions.

in this article we get a sense of lamp performance on ec2 by running a series of benchmarks on the drupal cms system. these benchmarks establish read throughput numbers for logged-in and logged-out users, for each of amazon's hardware classes.

we also look at op-code caching, and gauge it's performance benefit in cpu-bound lamp deployments.

load test your drupal application scalability with apache jmeter: part two

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:31:12 -0800

i recently posted an introductory article on using jmeter to load test your drupal application. if you've read this article and are curious about how to build a more sophisticated test that mimics realistic load on your site, read on.

the previous article showed you how to set up jmeter and create a basic test. to produce a more realistic test you should simulate "real world" use of your site. this typically involves simulating logged-in and logged-out users browsing and creating content. jmeter has some great functionality to help you do this.