Planet Drupal

A passionate posse of folks interested in advancing the state of non-profit software gathered this week at the Non-profit Software Development Summit. CiviCRM was a sponsor of the event which featured a full "track" of Civi-related events. Some civ-highlights from the conference:

• Helping some current users solve problems and get up to speed on more advance features in the CiviCRM 201 session. Our community does pretty amazing things in the "cloud" - but I really love having opportunities to interact with users and integrators and developers "live and in person". The feedback on 3.0 usability improvements (especially the new navigation menu) was super positive and very gratifying.
• Participating in Lobo's "action-packed" 60 minute session on Extending CiviCRM without Hacking Core. The more I play with all the things that can be done with our evolving hook functionality - the more excited I get.
• Joining with a group of CiviCRM integrators (and a few users) to brainstorm about Building the CiviCRM Community. This session was organized by the folks at Dharmatech - and partly inspired by a really cool book - The Art of Community - written by Jono Bacon who is the community manager for Ubuntu (a popular open source operating system distribution based on Debian Linux). It was exciting to collaborate in thinking about how folks with different interests and skills can potentially contribute towards strengthening the CiviCRM community and accelerating adoption of the platform. If you're interested in the ongoing sustainability of CiviCRM - I would encourage you to read Jono's book and think about what "team" you can join and / or create.

Thanks to Gunner and the team at Aspiration for organizing a great event!

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Have you checked out the Do It With Drupal website lately? There are a lot of exciting things happening! This year's keynotes come from Lullabot co-founder, Jeff Robbins, Brain Traffic's Kristina Halvorson and Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert. DiWD also has a lot of other awesome speakers coming. Check out our updated schedule to get a good overview of all of the sessions.

Back by popular demand, we will be doing case studies and site dissections from top Drupal sites including the Economist, New York Senate, and MTV UK. We'll have their development teams on hand to crack them open for us, show us what makes 'em tick, and answer our copious questions. We're also building and demonstrating Drupal fantasy sites – we create clones of popular websites in Drupal. This year's clones include Etsy, Craig's List and Yelp.

We've got master classes from Views and Panels author Earl Miles, Ubercart uber-guy Ryan Szrama, Organic Groups author, Moshe Weitzman, and Karen "the Queen of CCK" Stevenson talking about both CCK and date/event handling. We've got Drupal 7 co-lead Angie Byron talking about Drupal 7 and the list goes on and on. We've also got some great speakers from outside of the Drupal community coming to talk about many of the non-Drupal skills needed to build a successful Drupal project -- these include content strategy, community building, project management, and understanding some of the emerging technologies which we will all need to integrate into our sites over the next few years.

Another important part of the Do It With Drupal experience is the social interaction and networking. Want to share a drink with some of Drupal's top developers? Want to meet other site builders, developers, and decision makers who are in the same boat as you? Want to find some people to help answer your Drupal questions? With most of the event happening in one central place and organized evening events – not to mention lots of fun stuff nearby in the French Quarter, it's easy to meet people at Do It With Drupal!

What else besides a lot of interesting information and amazing speakers do you receive if you come to New Orleans you ask? How about these highlights:

• Amazing food - free breakfast and lunch each day for attendees
• A sweet swag bag that includes, yes... swag! Oh... and a Lullabot t-shirt.
• Your choice of one DVD from our popular Lullabot Learning Series
• Access to the 2009 Do It With Drupal video archive. We're recording it all! Go online once you get home and catch the sessions you missed during the excitement.
• Come hang out with Lullabot team, with a hammer and nails, at the Habitat for Humanity event on Saturday.
• Lullabot temporary tattoos. Pretend they're permanent. Look tough.

We'll see you in New Orleans!

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Mon, Nov 23, 2009 by Meena

Game developers have found the secret to developing fun interactive games that are successful, fun and ever so popular, all thanks to one of the most powerful online social networks, facebook. If your like many of the folks out there in Facebookland I'm sure your addicted to things like planting your crops, building restaurants, fighting mobsters, taking care of virtual pets, and even taking care of little fishies. I have attached a video that describes the top 5 games on Facebook as of November 2009!!! Let us know what your favourite game is on facebook and if it's true what they say, "once you sign on -you can't leave it alone."

You may have heard or read comments similar to the following about CSS frameworks:

"They are not flexible enough."
"It's too much useless code."
"I like to keep my CSS clean."
"Why do I need a framework if I know what I'm doing?"
"The site is not going to change, so we don't need a CSS framework."

A CSS framework cannot be expected to be the final solution to all your problems, but it can be a useful tool for structuring and theming your site more efficiently. Read on to learn more about what CSS frameworks are, pros and cons of using them, existing framework options, and related themes.

What exactly is a CSS framework?

Every time you start a new project there are several basic lines of code that you add to your CSS; you may want to remove the default margins added by the browsers, set the font size to 12px as the browser standard, create a popular layout, etc.

This is exactly what a CSS framework does, it gives you a nice set of code that takes care of these basic tasks for you.

"So, are CSS frameworks just a set of css files that I can add to my project?"

Not exactly. Some of them are, but others go even further to create a layout that allows you to work with more programatically created code. As you may know, you can't do arithmetic operations in CSS like "1em - .5em" or "1em + 2px", use inheritance as you would with objects, or use conditionals or loop clauses.

To explain how these more complicated frameworks work goes beyond the scope of this post, but if you are interested, take a look at Scaffold and Compass.

Pros and Cons of using a CSS framework

Before starting any coding, be sure to have a strategy; this is the paper and pen phase that we've all heard about and almost none of us does. It is very easy to look at a framework as inflexible, so before jumping to this conclusion, ask yourself:

• Have you chosen the right framework?
• Was your design created with the notion that had to fit an existing CSS grid?
• Are you aware of how a framework offers more than just a tool for layouts?

In my experience, the layout becomes more challenging when we try to use a framework, but the benefits to your CSS lie in decreasing the amount of code needed for your layout overall. Another thing that any good CSS framework takes care of is the well known list of IE CSS bugs. You will also find solutions for a standard CSS template for HTML elements, which is really helpful since every browser renders the HTML elements a little bit different. This template will also help you with cross-browser proofing your fonts and line heights, making it a little bit easier to work with em's for your font sizes instead of px.

Existing Framework Options

The list of CSS frameworks available has grown to over 20 last time I checked; a Google search can give you an idea of the variety that is out there. I have worked extensively with YAML, Blueprint, and 960, but I also have had the chance to do some experimentation with: YUI Grids, Scaffold, and Compass.

One of the nicest things with YAML is their YAML Builder tool, which will help you to easily build layouts, however YAML is not a real grid system (as far as I understand a grid should be) and you may find the layout possibilities to be a little bit limited.

With Blueprint, I have a bit of a dilemma. I especially like what a good job they did with the HTML elements and fonts, so much so that sometimes I only take this part from the framework and build the rest of the CSS code separately. However, I don't like their standard grid dimensions (if I'm using a grid I prefer to go with the standard size to avoid future compatibility problems with other CSS code) but you can easily enough change the column's width and gathers to create your own grid.

So far 960 it has been the most useful for me. Again this is not the final solution, and although in this case I really like the grid system, I tend to fall in favor of Blueprint for the HTML elements and fonts CSS job.

And What About Themes?

If you are a Drupal themer you may now be saying to yourself "Ok, frameworks are cool but we are talking about themes over here, which theme should I use?" Themes are more than just CSS code, and when it comes to themes, I prefer those ones that:

• assist me with the hook theme system
• give me enough containers so I don't have to spend time creating templates
• leave the CSS code fairly blank

To be more specific, I would tell you the Zen theme is still my top choice, and the CSS code will depend on the individual project.

Just Try It!

Needless to say, before you launch yourself into the next project with the idea that you are going to use a CSS framework, you should practice with them a little bit first. Try to build a full page with two different frameworks, don't stop at the layout, but move on to applying the existing code to your content and see how well the framework manage IE bugs.

I hope that helps explain some of the pros and cons of using CSS frameworks. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below.

We’ve been very hard at work on the new Fusion themes and upcoming website. The third beta of Fusion will be coming in about a week, which will likely be our second-to-last beta. There are only a few items remaining before a release candidate.

Others in the Drupal community have been checking out Fusion’s potential, whether through releasing new themes or launching sites. Also, we’ve got initial docs up for both end users and subtheming.

If you haven’t had a chance to take it for a spin yet, Jeremy put together a pair of videos to give you a basic tour of Fusion and our first released subtheme, Acquia Prosper (the other Acquia themes are well on their way, just waiting for RTL).

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The Drupal community is eagerly awaiting its newest release. At this point, the co-maintainers have held the position that Drupal 7 will be released "when it is ready" - in essence, when all the critical issues have been addressed. A list of the remaining bugs can be found on drupal.org under the contributor links in the right sidebar. This post will summarize some of the major differences one can expect to find in Drupal 7.

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How to customize the news aggregator or use it to build other applications

In Eric's announcement last month, he emphasized that Managing News is both a product and a platform. In this post, I'll explain what this means in concrete terms and how Managing News can be highly customized or used to build something other than a news aggregator. This post assumes some Drupal site building experience and at times some Drupal coding experience. But even if you're new to Drupal, it will give you a useful glimpse of what's possible with Managing News.

Modular architecture

The package that you can download at ManagingNews.com is the fourth iteration of Managing News. This time we paid special attention to keeping it simple and modular. Managing News consists of Drupal core plus about 20 contrib modules, four custom modules, five Features, and a design that is split into a base theme (Tao) with the actual theme on top of it (Jake).

Features

We have written extensively about Features in the past. If you are new to the concept, the quick explanation is that features are special modules that contain configurations for other modules. Use cases of Features are typically higher-level than those of modules. One example would be an "Event section" feature, consisting of configuration for the Calendar and the Date module. Features can be turned on and off just like any other module, and they have full access to the Drupal API.

You can see all the features in Managing News by going to the Admin section (link on the top left when you're logged in) and clicking on "Features":

We can see five features on this page: MN Core is the base feature. Most importantly, it contains the configuration for aggregation functionality. MN Search provides the search page and the configuration for saving searches and highlighting them on the front page. MN Channels offers a way of collecting single news items into custom lists that can be printed or distributed via RSS. MN About is a very simple about section that basically contains a book node and a menu item. Finally MN World contains the configuration for geo tagging map displays.

It's always a special time when Druplicon shows up at any of the Drupal conventions and events. The people at Trellon are always on the lookout for when he is going to make an appearance so we can take pictures with our camera phones and MMS them to friends and relatives. Imagine our surprise when we saw him (her?) show up in a music video on one of our favorite social media sites. Pictures below the break.Read More >>>

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Passwords, user accounts, email verification. I have never liked requiring my website's visitors to register before they can leave a comment. There is a large segment of people that like to submit quality comments online, but they don't want to be required to leave their personal information there. So from the beginning, I have always allowed anonymous commenting by unregistered visitors and for the most party, they quality of the comments haven't suffered. However, allowing for anonymous comments also invited my site into a war against comment spam. My latest weapon to do the fighting for me in this war is Mollom.

I was first introduced to Mollom in the Fall of 2007 as a beta tester. Prior to Mollom, I had been using a number of techniques, modules, and services with limited success in blocking unwanted spam. While some of these filtering methods did help me filter out unwanted content, I was still spending quite a bit of my time moderating the comments for potential spam. Worse, in long absences from the site I had to disable anonymous commenting for fear that I would come back to a site riddled with ads for the latest popular pharmaceutical drugs or some girl that wanted to be seen for a price. That's when Mollom entered the picture and helped stop most of the spam from entering my site.

In the two years since I've used Mollom, the service probably has blocked more than 100,000 pieces of spam from being posted at my site. Since, the current statistics provided by Mollom only date back to early 2008, the official number of spam blocked stands at around 77,000. In other words, I receive an average of 120 comments a day that require no moderation on my part.

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& Web 3.0

Web 3.0, variously called the semantic web, web of data or linked data web, is something that I, like many working in information technology, web development, information science, etc., am compelled to follow. Actually, coming from a library & information science background, I am keenly interested in the whole idea of a web of data.

Some friends of mine are much further along in actually implementing so-called linked data in their projects - see 'Wikipedia as controlled Vocabulary.' I'm not sure I'm "allowed" to interchange all of these concepts - I've been reading about the semantic web for about 4-5 years now and still struggle to explain it to people in a simple, jargonless way. So, I've just started playing with the concepts and thinking creatively about them and have thus become a bit less restrained in my thinking about something that really isn't that mysterious. I think of it using the following simplified equation:

Semantic Web = Web of data + Linking data

In other words, right now the web is a web of pages (mostly .html). Those pages are connected by links. But, those pages contain loads of data, many uniuquely identifiable pieces of data representing concepts like "Barack Obama" and "Wimbledon." If we could "meaningfully" mark up data in all those pages, we could link it together better and run more complex queries against it - the web as a giant database. (the Tim Berners-Lee message)

So, it occurred to me the other day that the best way to actually get my hands "dirty" in using things like RDFa and SPARQL is via Drupal. We are now roughly 6 months into our Drupal implementation, about which I have written loads of posts via this blog (See tags: Drupal and Weekly Drupal). We will be finishing up our programming and configuration of Drupal and migrating and tagging content with taxonomies we're in the process of writing over the next 2-4 months. What better to be thinking about possibly adding semantic mark-up (RDFa) to our content?

Luckily, I won't be stabbing in the dark on this one. There is already a large movement afoot in the Drupal community in this area. Notably:

• Dries' 2008 Drupalcon presentation (beginning around minute 37 he discusses semantic web and Drupal including RDF)
• There's a Semantic Web Drupal group
• Post by Dries on 'Drupal, semantic web and search'
• Modules such as RDF, RDF CCK, SPARQL,  RDF SPARQL Endpoint and others
• A host of discussions and other resources on drupal.org

But, and it's a big BUT, I still find it slightly daunting to get started. However, I suspect, like much surrounding the semantic web, learning by doing might be the best route to take. I happily accept suggestions or tips, however :-) ...

Last year's highly acclaimed free breakfast and lunch for all attendees will, of course, be returning to Do It With Drupal this year. But with the recession upon us, we wanted to offer even more to this year's attendees. So each of this year's DIWD attendees will also get their choice of one DVD from the highly acclaimed Lullabot Learning Series. These videos normally sell for $80 each, so that's worth at least another day's worth of breakfast and lunch, and probably some drinks too!

The Lullabot Learning Series currently offers 7 different titles to put you on the road to Drupal bliss:

• Understanding Drupal
• Site Building With Drupal
• Administering Drupal
• Learning CCK
• Learning Views
• Theming Basics For Drupal
• Advanced Theming For Drupal

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This video shows how to use the magical symbolic link, or symlink. These are basically a handy *nix way to create shortcuts. They come in particularly handy if you want to organize code for your websites outside of the web server's document root and that is the example we use here.

Linux Journal is a monthly magazine focused specifically on Linux. Linux Journal switched to Drupal in 2005, and hasn't looked back since. Last year in October of 2008 Linux Journal decided to turn to Mollom to protect their site against spammers.

In a case study on Mollom.com, Linux Journal Webmistress Katherine Druckman looks back at one year of using Mollom, and explains how Mollom has helped the Linux Journal staff focus on building community, rather than having to deal with spam.

To give you an idea of how much pain spammers can inflict (and how much Mollom can help); there have been many days when Mollom has blocked almost 10k spam attacks against the Linux Journal website. Last year, Mollom blocked more than 1.5 million spam messages for Linux Journal alone.

Linux Journal was the first magazine to be published about Linux, and has been an important contributor to Linux' adoption. I started reading Linux Journal back in 1997, and I still read it today. We want these kind of publications to be wildly successful in promoting Open Source software. So on rainy Mondays like today, it is stories like this, that motivate me to work on Drupal and Mollom, and that make me hate spammers even more.

I recently had the pleasure of reading Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization by Ben Finklea, published by Packt Publishing. As the lead developer of a small start-up that depends on organic search traffic (as well as Search Engine Marketing, SEM, campaigns) I already have a keen interest and generally thorough understanding of SEO practices in general, and SEO tricks specifically for Drupal. I approached this book wondering how much I may or may not actually learn. Gladly, it was worth the read.

Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization is a book that any Drupal shop should have on the shelf for reference, and any budding (or experienced) Drupal dev should read to help them add value to any customer site they are building. Search engines many times send the lion's share of traffic to new sites, so building a site that search engines view favorably should always be a priority for any serious site construction project.

In a certain sense, this book is more than a Drupal book as it expounds on a few SEO topics and tools that are completely separate from Drupal. For a few site owners, this is golden as they will not have to plunk down another $20 (or euros, or pounds) for a general SEO book. In the first few chapters general marketing advise, how to set up a Google Analytics account, and even the value of viewing user activities though a click heat map are discussed. All are outside Drupal proper, but are topics that help round out the general knowledge base of the reader. The book assumes a very rudimentary level of Drupal understanding, and assumes no SEO knowledge.

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I did a screencast on how you can use Drush Make to generate 'builds' based on Drupal core, with optional components such as install profiles + module/theme/library dependencies. The example given is the Managing News news aggregation system.

I then show how you can add the build as a Platform in Aegir, and rapidly provision sites on it in a multisite structure.

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After over 6 years using and contributing to Drupal, one can see that Drupal is becoming more and more popular ... Here are several events that I encountered in the past few weeks to this end ...

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Information

This is the first episode of the Drupal Podcast by Himerus. I hope you enjoy it, and come back for more!

Quite a while back I wrote a post called Ten Drupal 6 modules for every site. That still to date has been one of my most visited posts on this site, despite the fact that the post and modules listed in that are a bit outdated. So with that in mind, I'm going to do a three part series on the most useful drupal modules, the first of which is this podcast on the 10 must have modules for Site Builders. Part 2 will be the 10 must have modules for site users (Usability), and Part 3 will be the 10 must have modules for site administrators.

Resources

• Views
• CCK
• Panels 3
• Context
• Pathauto
• Imagecache
• Devel
• Drush
• Features
• Ubercart

Shameless 'retweet' of Adrian's article announcing Aegir's move from CVS to Git for our development.

Those of you who have been cloning from my git repos at git.mig5.net, may now wish to clone from the officially-supported git repos at git.aegirproject.org. The Issue queues for reporting bugs will for the time being remain at d.o.

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Skip to video and slides

A couple weeks ago I put out a blog to garner feedback on why Drupal kicks serious a**, and a big thanks to everyone who responded. I integrated a number of the comments with my own personal experience with Drupal and presented my talk last week to a diverse group of 20 or so web tech people in the local Boise Idaho area. Judging from the audience participation, I think the presentation went really well. I recorded the talk (from two different camera angles, no less!) and am posting the video and slides for folks that are curious about what they missed, or who are interested in giving a similar talk themselves.

I did a little research before hand about how Drupal compares to popular CMSes like Joomla, Plone, Wordpress, ExpressionEngine, and SharePoint. The talk was also directed in many ways to audience members who have rolled their own CMS, because that was my experience coming into Drupal and I found that Drupal solved many of the problems I was attempting to solve myself, but in much more elegant ways.

Drupal kicking butt - Video and slideshow

The format of the talk was "10 ways Drupal (might) kick your CMS's a**", and here are the 10 things about Drupal that stand out to me as particularly steller:

#1 - The Drupal Community

The community is a big part of what keeps me involved in Drupal at the level I am. I helped found and participate in a local Drupal users group, which provides important face-to-face time with other people using the Drupal, and keeps us all abreast of important news in the project. I also talk about regional conferences and Drupalcon, IRC, and leadership in the community.

#2 - Central Module Repository

Drupal keeps all of its modules in one place, unlike many other CMSes. This has many benefits, and has helped to keep significant licensing problems to be an issue in the community. Also, a standard module release process allows both developers and administrators to have a clear path forward with module upgrades and choosing the correct module version for the Drupal version they use

#3 - Drupal is a Framework

For developers, Drupal does a lot of heavy lifting and really lets you get plugged virtually anywhere in the platform. The module structure encourages good coding practices and good organization.

#4 - Drupal is Mature

Drupal has been actively developed for 8 years, and lots of big web sites are using it, like the White House, The Onion, Fast Company, BMG Records, NASA, Warner Brothers and Yahoo Research. Even if you don't understand the nuances of security and scalability, you can point to hear examples of how Drupal must provide a solid framework for both.

#5 - Flexible Data Structures

Drupal allows you to create flexible content, much like Access or Filemaker, and even creates full CRUD (Add, edit, view and delete forms) on the fly. So, storing custom content is easy, and doesn't require any programming or touching the database. (video includes demo)

#6 - Flexible Content Feed Output

Once you have content, you have many options for how you want to output the data. You can pass content filters via the URL or even expose filters to users so they can narrow down content based on whatever criteria you specify. The ability to generate these lists of data via configuration without touching queries or code can be a powerful administrative tool.

#7 - Flexible Path Aliasing

In Drupal, you can specify how you want a path to look based on virtually any information in your content, including title, date, or custom fields. Drupal can handle redirecting duplicate URLs (also called aliases) to a single URL with a 301 redirect to prevent a duplicate content filter in search engines.

#8 - Multi-Language Support

Including another language is trivial, and you can even override content within the same language. There's community infrastructure to support translators even if they don't know how to use, install or develop in Drupal.

#9 - Making Forms is a Breeze

Creating forms in Drupal is as easy as creating content types, and can be done without any programming. If you do need to program a form, however, there is a powerful API which will allow you to generate a secure, robust form in just a couple of steps. There is also a nice utility for generating module configuration forms.

#10 - A Bunch of Other Stuff

Including distributions for intranets and social aggregation, cross-database compatibility, an active usability team, hierarchical taxonomy, a powerful theme layer and AJAX framework.

Post-presentation discussion

During and after the presentation, there were a lot of great questions and discussion about topics like:

• How does Drupal store content types?
• Can Drupal work with obscure databases like BDB?
• How do you create a wiki in Drupal?
• How much does Drupal break from one version to the next?
• How difficult is the upgrade process from one Drupal version to the next?
• How much of this stuff is handled by core Drupal, and how much by contributed modules?
• What versions of MySQL and PHP are the different Drupal versions compatible with?
• How many people non-developers use Drupal?
• Discussion on ecommerce solutions for Drupal

Sometimes, you read things on the web and they just stick in your head. Randomly nagging at you to do something about them.

Well, on Friday, I ran across a tweet by @djay75, which I will repost here.

Governments trust plone. There are 5 times as many US gov #plone sites as #drupal, (e.g. FBI, CIA). Why? security http://bit.ly/199qWh

The link takes you to a Plone marketing page, which has this information:

Problem A2: Broken Access Control
How Plone handles this: Plone is based on the well-proven (7 years in production), flexible and granular ACL/roles-based security model of Zope. In addition, Plone utilizes an innovative workflow-based approach to security, which means that end-users never see or modify the security settings — they only work with security presets that have been supplied to them by the developers of the application. This greatly reduces the possibility of misconfigured security settings.

And, having been bitten by this in Drupal a few times, I looked at this line end-users never see or modify the security settings and thought, “Hm, I wonder if you can do that in Drupal?”

Well, of course you can. The original module code took me about 2 hours (thanks to some nice new API features in Drupal 7). I spent another 2-3 hours polishing the documentation and the user interface (making it so you don’t accidentally lock yourself out of your own site.) And now, we have the Secure Permissions module for Drupal 7.

I can see this being very helpful in some use-cases, as site permissions and roles can be configured on a development site, then exported to code and loaded onto the production site. To be really useful immediately, we need a backport to Drupal 6, which would require leveraging the Permissions API module. If you’re interested in that, let me know.

Update: And I just realized, the entire module only has one SQL query in it. Big win for the Drupal APIs. And, for the record, the module is ~ 450 lines of code, probably half of which are comments.