Matt Butcher
Dave Hall: Review of "Drupal 6, JavaScript, and jQuery"
Dave Hall recently reviewed my Drupal 6, JavaScript, and jQuery book.
Dave Hall's Blog
I found this observation particularly apt:
This book is definitely not for the copy and paste coder, nor the developer who just wants ready made solutions they can quickly hack into an existing project. Some may disagree, but I think this is a real positive of this book. Matt uses the examples to illustrate certain concepts or features which he wants the reader to understand. I found the examples got me thinking about what I wanted to use JS and jQuery for in my Drupal sites.
This is what I want to accomplish in the book. My goal is to get coders thinking about what they can do (and how they can do it) rather than simply re-using code. I'm so glad that Dave noticed this and brought it into focus. If you are interested in taking a peek at the book, you can download one of the chapters.
QueryPath Performance Optimizations on Reduncery
Continuing a trend on the non-evilness of optimization, this article discusses some methods of improving performance in QueryPath.
Early this week, a Twitter analysis tool called Reduncery was launched by a friend of mine. Reduncery calculates how much of a "redunce" a particular user is -- that is, what percentage of a user's tweets are retweets (RT). It can also calculate how ineffective it is for one person to retweet another. In this case, it calculates the overlap in the followers of the original tweeter with the followers of the retweeter. In what follows, we will look at the ways Reduncery optimizes QueryPath to keep page load times down.
Using Flashy to Play Video inside Lightbox2
By default, the Drupal Lightbox2 module supports the flvPlayer flash movie player, which is not Open Source. However, Drupal has a 100% Open Source video player called Flashy. Here's a quick method of overriding Lightbox's setup to use Flashy instead of flvPlayer. Update: Fixed for Internet Explorer.
A Simple Pattern for Importing Images
When migrating legacy sites into Drupal, one challenging issue is importing images. The CCK imagefield module is one of the most popular ways to store images in Drupal 6, and we at Palantir.net use it on all of our production sites. This short tutorial shows you how to write a quick importer that can copy existing images into Drupal's files directory and then attach the image to a node using the CCK filefield. You might use this strategy within a larger importer (perhaps driven by Drupal's Batch API).
Here's a quick pattern that I've now successfully used to transform an existing image into a Drupal-controlled image stored in a CCK field.
Drupal and Sentiment Analysis on OpenAmplify Blog
Over at the OpenAmplify blog, SteveS talks about how the CMS world has changed, and how Drupal has "come to his rescue" as he builds a new corporate website. He discusses using OpenAmplify and the Drupal Amplify module to analyze sentiment.
Sentiment analysis is all the rage right now, with the New York Times running a big story on it last Sunday. The Drupal Amplify module provides a foothold into this market already, and I'm excited to be talking about it in my QueryPath session at DrupalCon Paris next week.