Lullabot

October's announcement that the White House website had relaunched on Drupal brought cheers from the open source community. Even outside of the Drupal world, the high-profile government site was seen a vote of confidence for open platforms and collaborative development. The teams at Acquia and Phase2 helped deliver a great site that silences outdated claims that OSS can't be used on "Enterprise" level sites, and impresses anyone who thought that that Drupal sites have to look like blogs.

Naturally, there's been a lot of chatter about the switch, some good and some bad. I thought I'd take some time to round up the most interesting articles for the community and study what they say about how Drupal and its role in the White House's web presence are being perceived.

The Associated Press broke the story on the morning of the 24th, confirming rumors that had been circulating about a high-profile government site launch. (At DrupalCon DC in March, hallway chatter was buzzing about Dries Buytaert's invite to the White House to discuss Drupal and its technical underpinnings.) The story cast Drupal in a pretty favorable light, and touched on some basic Open Source issues like crowdsourced security.

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Announcing Site Building With Drupal
How to install, customize, configure, and launch a Drupal site

This is it! Site Building With Drupal is the definitive guide to Drupal website creation. In this densely-packed 4 hour and 45 minute video, Addison Berry, Angela Byron, and Jeff Robbins illustrate Drupal's concepts and define its jargon while building a complete website from the ground up.

The team shows how to install Drupal, add modules, create and configure content types, build listing pages, and configure Drupal's multi-user permission system. You'll see how to use Drupal's taxonomy system to classify and organize your site's content, how to create and configure sidebar content using blocks, and many common tasks such as setting up a rich-text editor. Also discussed are tips for choosing which contributed modules to use, how to create private content, and how to launch a site.

This video pairs well with Administering Drupal, which shows how to administer this site once it has been created.

Early release pricing: Site Building With Drupal is now available for download at an early release price of $55. That's more than 25% off the normal price. But don't delay. This price is only available for the first few weeks while we wait to get the DVD version back from the pressing plant. When the DVD comes in, this price will go up.

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Angie Byron, Nate Haug, Karen Stevenson, and Jeff Robbins discuss the new features of Drupal 7 as well as the latest Drupal news.

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This command line video covers the three most common commands for compressing and archiving files, including how to get them back out again. Most commonly you first hit the need for these when you download a file and need to get it uncompressed. We'll cover the following commands:

• zip
• unzip
• gzip
• gunzip
• tar

Jeff Miccolis and Alex Barth talk about the latest work on their Open Atrium distribution, and the Features module.

Development Seed has been on the cutting edge of dealing with making deployment of module configurations easier from different development environments, and there was a lot of buzz about the Features module and exportable configurations at DrupalCon Paris. Alex and Jeff led a popular Birds of a Feather session on the topic, and Alex talks a bit about what was covered.

A lot has happened since DrupalCon DC where there were a number of deployment discussions about different solutions ranging from Context & Spaces modules, Patterns module and the Deploy module. This write-up "Deployment and migration: hot at DrupalCon DC" gives the most comprehensive overview of the different options that were discussed at the time.

As Young Hahn concluded, the missing gap that needed filling was pushing for modules to make their configurations exportable, which is what has been happening a lot more especially with the help of the Chaos tool suite (aka CTools). So keep an eye out for more modules providing exportable configurations, more features, and eventually more products and easier ways of making Drupal distributions.

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Eric Gundersen is the President of Development Seed, which Eric describes as a hybrid between a International Development organization and an IT shop -- quite a unique combination.

Development Seed is at the heart and center of the Washington, D.C. Drupal community, and a crucial player in helping bring Drupal into the United States Government. Eric talks about discussions that he's had with Aneesh Chopra, the Chief Technology Officer of the United States, as well as Vivek Kundra, the Chief Information Officer of the United States.

At DrupalCon Paris, Eric had mentioned that there were representatives from the White House and a number of other Government agencies that were coming to the DC Drupal meetups that DevSeed hosted, which we saw the fruits of with the big news over the weekend with WhiteHouse.gov going Drupal. Eric was also a key player in coordinating some Lullabot on-site training at the Department of Commerce earlier this month.

Development Seed has also earned a reputation within the Drupal community as putting out some of the most innovative and cutting edge work in the realm of Drupal Distributions and Products -- specifically with Aegir & Drush, the Features module & Feature servers, Context & Spaces, Open Atrium distribution and most recently the Managing News distribution.

Eric also talks about some of the Mapping and visualization work that he's been doing with the Location, Geo, Open Layers, Mapstraction and Data modules along with using tile data sources of Open Street Map and CloudMade. Six months ago, Eric would have recommended using Nice Map along with a WMS server, but now he would recommend using these other modules.

For more information on the WhiteHouse.gov move to Drupal and who was involved with that, be sure to check out these posts:

• Personal Democracy Forum's TechPresident on WhiteHouse.gov Goes Drupal
• Tim O'Reilly's Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal
• Slashdot thread on White House Website Switches To Open Source
• Dries Buytaert's post on Whitehouse.gov using Drupal
• Ping Vision's Laura Scott asks if WhiteHouse.gov goes Drupal: can open source lead to open government?

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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.)

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Jimmy Berry (aka boombatower) is the Drupal 7 Testing Subsystem Maintainer and maintainer of testing.drupal.org. Testing has become an integral part of the core Drupal development process as Drupal 7 has adopted a test-driven development model, which Dries explains here.

So Jimmy has picked up the testing torch for Drupal, and talks about his involvement with the SimpleTest framework and helping getting it into Drupal core, how that's changed the core development process, and what it could mean if also applied to contributed modules as well.

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Konstantin Käfer (aka kkafer) gives an overview of his Drupalcon Paris talk on optimizing the front-end Javascript and CSS -- including some YSlow tips.

Konstantin also talks a bit about his Support File Cache module that allows additional front-end optimizations by allowing you to control the bundling of CSS and Javascript files.

He also talks a bit about the Front-End Drupal that he co-wrote with Emma Jane Hogbin.

Finally, Konstantin talks a bit about some of his favorite changes in Drupal 7.

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Narayan Newton is a database administrator who has been a long-time member of the Drupal.org infrastructure team since the time that he was a student at Oregon State University's Open Source Lab. OSUOSL hosts a number of open source projects, but they had never seen the type of explosive growth that Drupal has had, and Narayan has observed this growth up close as the servers were melting down.

Narayan gives a little behind-the-scenes history of the scaling challenges of Drupal.org and describes the current server configuration with Varnish reverse-proxy caching, as well as some of the other tools that he uses in order to trace down performance bottlenecks.

Narayan works with Tag1 Consulting and is becoming a co-maintainer of the Pressflow Drupal distribution.

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Thought I'd share with you guys some pictures of the Lullabots over the years. I am categorically not Lullabot's photographer -- we've got some super talented people on staff here who take amazing pictures. However, I thought it might be fun to share some pics that I came across as I was cleaning up my photos this weekend.... Enjoy!

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David Strauss from Four Kitchens talks about the special patched version of Drupal that he has been maintaining that runs the Drupal.org website. Drupal.org is the hub of activity for the Drupal community, and probably the most active community that is powered by the Drupal software.

There are a number of performance and scalability patches that were written specifically for Drupal.org, which have since gotten committed to Drupal 7, and that have also been backported to Drupal 6. David is maintaining that set of patches in a performance optimized version of Drupal 6 in what is called Pressflow.

David talks more about the features of Pressflow Drupal in the podcast and how the Drupal that runs Drupal.org actually has more in common with Pressflow Drupal than "regular" Drupal that most people download.

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Addi Berry, Angie Byron, Jeff Eaton, Karen Stevenson, and Jeff Robbins talk about their own screwups as Drupal newbies and common mistakes often seen when creating Drupal sites. The podcast includes a long list of common site building, coding, and Drupal project planning mistakes, screwups, and kerfuffles. If you're new to Drupal, please, learn from our mistakes!

Pick of the week: Migrate module

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Adrian Rossouw has been a long-time contributor to the Drupal project and even claims the Drupal.org user id of 1337. He was a co-founder of Bryght, and helped develop the Hostmaster system for deploying sites. That has since evolved into the Aegir system as well as the command-line toolkit of drush.

These are some of the components behind Adrian's vision and the larger Smallcore movement to make Drupal distributions work easier and more widely used in the Drupal community. Adrian also talks about the future of Drupal distributions and what it means in Drupal 7 to have installation profiles be treated as modules that came out a series of issues linked from the following issue: Fix some conceptual problems with install profiles and make them actually usable

Adrian also talks about how this will tie into apt-get and how piecing together Drupal websites is moving towards the same ways that people manage Linux distributions.

Almost two years ago, DC Comics launched an interesting web site called "Zuda." Built on Drupal, its goal was to provide talented indie webcomic artists with a chance to pitch their ideas, compete against other artists for reader votes, and potentially get signed for The Big Leagues. (Think of it like American Idol for web comics.)

During the final lap before Zuda's launch, Lullabot helped its team with theming training, feature tweaks, and performance optimization. As a long-time fan of webcomics, I was excited to be a part of the project, even late in the game. We worked closely with the Zuda development team during that phase, and were thrilled to see it launch successfully. Drupal's emphasis on social features and support for audience contribution of content provided them with a great platform for development on a tight timeline.

At the time of its launch, Zuda was controversial -- some thought it was a great idea, others in the webcomics world thought that it was just an attempt by a corporation to elbow in on a new market. Everyone agreed, though, that the site itself was a new approach to bridging the free-for-all world of webcomics with the editorially-controlled land of "Pro Comics."

Today it's still going strong, still running on Drupal, and -- even more exciting -- three Zuda winners were nominated for Harvey Awards, a prestigious comics industry award. High Moon, the comic featured in the screenshot above, even walked away with the award for Best Online Comic. Scott Kurtz, the mastermind behind the popular PVP Online comic, had some really cool stuff to say about Zuda after the awards. Kurtz was an early critic of the site, but it sounds like he's come to respect the Zuda team for the passion they have for their vision, and their unique approach to bringing great talent to a wider audience.

It's encouraging to see Zuda evolving into a valuable part of the comics landscape -- and doubly exciting to see Drupal helping them do that. Congratulations, Zuda!

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Peter Wolanin talks about the Apache Solr Search Integration module, and his involvement with polishing and finishing it along with Jacob Singh from what Robert Douglass started.

Apache Solr has been picking up steam this past year with it's faceted search features, and getting a lot more exposure with being deployed on the module search on Drupal.org.

Peter talks about the mechanics of how Apache Solr works, and how it's based up on the Apache Lucene text search engine library, which is a lot more optimized for search than SQL. Peter was working on Apace Solr integration as a part of the Acquia Search service, which is geared toward people who do not want to deal with setting up and maintaining a dedicated server for search.

Finally, Peter also talks a bit about some of the exciting things on the horizon in the future with Views integration and search integration with other modules.

For more information:

• Acquia Search
• Acquia Search available commercially
• Acquia Search: benefits for visitors
• Acquia Search: benefits for site administrators

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Emma Jane Hogbin is a co-author of Front End Drupal, which covers Drupal's theming system. She talks about that process, and how Lullabot's Using Drupal affected the evolution of Front End Drupal. She also talks about the process of learning Drupal's theming system and some of the exciting changes that have happened since she started with Drupal in 2002/2003. (Also see Addi's popular article "My Aha! Moments in Drupal theming"

Emma Jane is also a user of the Bazaar version control system and talks about the importance of the community of support when deciding upon which version control system to go with.

Emma Jane will also be presenting at the Do It with Drupal conference in New Orleans this December.

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Benjamin Doherty aka bangpound was recruited to help overhaul the taxonomy system for Drupal 7 and make taxonomy compatible with the new fields in core API. He talks about that process as well as some of the new features and functionality that taxonomy that will surely make a lot of librarian science-types very happy.

A lot of the inspiration for this core work was from the Content Taxonomy module, which is a Drupal 6 module for creating a CCK field type for referencing taxonomy terms.

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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?

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Ben Melançon of the Agaric Design Collective talks about his work on the Science Collaboration Framework, which is a system that utilizes RDF to facilitate scientific debate and collaboration. Ben also mentions PD Online Research as another Drupal site that is utilizing RDF.

Ben talks about a number of patches that are still being worked on during the Drupal 7 code slush period. In particular, Stéphane Corlosquet aka "scor" is still working on the RDF core module patch, and there are a number other pending RDF-related patches

Another issue that was just committed this morning was Converting Taxonomy to Field API.

Finally, a long-standing pending issue that people have wanted has been to kill the profile module and Convert Profile module to Field API, which is another pending issue for Drupal 7.

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