Planet Drupal
Drupal Makes Dreams Come True
One of my favorite quotes from DrupalCon Boston '08 was Leslie Hawthorne's, "Drupal makes sandwiches happen." The quote I think describes just how amazing the Drupal community really is -- people going out of their way to help other people. The past few weeks have been big weeks for me in large part due to my involvement in the Drupal community. Ever since Steve and I first spoke about Druplash at DrupalCampWI in January we have been trying our best to give back to the community by organizing and speaking at more events. This led to speaking at DrupalCon '08 about our research in Drupal-powered Flash and Flex applications. While we were in Boston, I met Claudio Luis Vera, a partner at Studio:Module, a firm working with the MIT Media Lab on a new Drupal-powered website. Claudio invited Steve and I to come with him to MIT to present some of our research, which we happily agreed to do -- because it got us a quick tour of the Media Lab which we've both dreamed about seeing.
Who would have guessed that this chance meeting at DrupalCon would start the ball rolling on some major life changes for me.
Search Sprint Conclusion
The Minnesota Search Sprint is unofficially over. Earnest, Djun, and Blake have already left. Chad is local, but I've said goodbye to him too. Robert and I leave tomorrow. And David is vacationing a few extra days in sunny Minnesota (because it's warmer than Montreal???).
DrupalCamp Vancouver Success
DrupalCamps help bring out creativity. This weekend I attended Vancouver's DrupalCamp, and I really enjoyed myself. On top of it, I am always amazed by talking with others at these types of events. Other developers who I think really know their stuff said to me, "The camps are great. They remind of how much more I need to learn." I thought they knew it all!
Highlighting some Drupal site recipes
My usual response to "Can Drupal do X?" is "Drupal can do anything!" Usually the tougher question is figuring out just how to do X in the sea of configuration options and modules available.
Drupal’s site itself has a site recipes section (read carefully, some can be a bit out of date), and there are other such tutorials out there on the web (just add in a keyword for the kind of site you’re trying to build). Below are a few links to Drupal Recipes for several common website styles.
File download in Drupal
The attached ebook, Files in Drupal, has been expanded and updated to account for changes in Drupal 6.
— Update, May 10th, 2008.
You'll find in the pdf document attached to this posting “10 things you ought to know” about file download in Drupal, from a developer’s perspective. This small guide provides sample code, recipes, concise yet complete explanations, tricks, and a thorough coverage of the module hook function file_download. The document is 6 11 16 pages long, it has been expanded and updated to account for changes in Drupal 5 and 6. If you’ve downloaded the document before May 10th, 2008, please redownload it. Read more →
Smart(er) TinyMCE Configuration for Drupal
A WYSIWYG editor can be a blessing and a curse on a Drupal site. Give your users too much control and they'll make right-aligned, purple h1 tags inside of three levels of tables they made.
Still, users expect to be able to control basic formatting, link to nodes within their own site easily, and easily link images and documents.
With the help of four modules, you can craft a great experience for your users. I'll show you how to build this using TinyMCE, which I use on all my Drupal implementations.
This week in Gent
On Wednesday Gent hosted the IBBT Brokerage event, some usual crowd, lots of unusual crowd .. but mostly trying to figure out what's the difference between the startups I usually run into and the ones I saw at the IBBT event. The weirdest part .. the language .. Dutch...
Thursday was the Fireside chat with Seth , again some usual suspects , but also some unexpected people .. Seth gave an interesting overview of the current Java Content management platforms , Daisy, Magnolia,
Obviously the language debate came up , I really need to finish that blog post :)
The format, 1 presentation followed by 2 shorter group brainstorm sessions where one member of the group presented the findings was really interesting, you ended up speaking to people you don't always run into. Altough the 25 minute brainstorm sessions migyt be a bit longer. Definitely worth another version. Just the food afterwards... 3 times spare Ribs at Amadeus in 4 months time is just too much .. next time Gekroonde Hoofden please :)
Then Friday, Matt and I spent the day in Gent brainstorming about that undead project :)
Designers Guide to jQuery: Drupalcamp Vancouver Presentation
Thanks to all that attended my session for Drupalcamp Vancouver. We had a much bigger turn out that expected and ended up having to move into the big room. I've attached the slides here as well as the link to both tutorials. Both JS files are linked in the tutorials at the footer.
Accordion Tutorial:http://www.stevekrueger.com/jquery-accordion-tutorial
"Coda" tutorial:http://www.stevekrueger.com/jquery-accordion-tutorial/index2.html
And here are the slides:
DrupalCamp Vancouver 2008: Information Architecture Slide Deck
Attached you'll find the latest revision of "my" IA presentation at DrupalCamp Vancouver 2008. This presentation has been evolving since DrupalConBarcelona.
DrupalCamp Vancouver 2008: Panels 2 Slide Deck
Attached you'll find my slide deck from Your Introduction to Panels 2. This was a really fun talk to present, and the room was packed. I hope people found it useful and if you attended and have any feedback, please let me know so i can sharpen the presentation for DrupalCamp Seattle.
Drupal Camp PDX
Off to a great start at Drupal Camp PDX. Ben Kaplan and Andrew Morton are kicking off the day with what Drupal is and is not. Some great analogs are being used to illustrate what Drupal is and is not. Of course having a Drupal Camp in the beautiful Portland area makes it all the better. Read more »
Non-persistent variable_set for testing and hackery
Writing simpletests for imagecache_create_url and file_create_url today, I had to change a few of Drupal's persistent variables, namely clean_url and file_downloads. I was kind of frustrated by the need to save the old values, set the values I needed for the test case, run the test, then restore the old variables.
Spam comment tale continues
Things are getting worse at the spam comment front, whereas I used to get about 2 to 3 spam comments a day (or comments that look very real but advertise a commercial website nevertheless), I now have attracted more people that leave unwanted comments. Up to 20 a day, worse than my mailbox *with* spamfilter.
This is bad...
80% of those comments are added to a single article which alarmed me, investigating this a bit I found the following sites in my top referrer list. This digitalpoint.com forum seems to be used for advertising high PageRank sites so people can spam and advertise their own sites.
So Mollom is of no use, a difficult CAPTCHA is of no use, I really do not know what to do. To make it easier to find real comment spam I am probably going to disable the URL-text field so that saves me one step (checking of the URL is commercial) because 20% of the spam comments actually offer quality content and look very serious.
Another problem with comment moderation is the fact that it requires a lot of mouse-clicks and page rendering just to mark a comment spam and send it to Mollom. (20 times a day) It could be easier if I could mail the content of comments to myself, that way I do not have to open the comment, read it. On top of that, mailing it to me could be useful to have my mail spam-filter have a go at it.
At days it feels as if I am fighting a lone battle against the Internet. And I think I am loosing it.
Live from the Minnesota Search Sprint, Day One
Day One of the Minnesota Search Sprint has already received detailed reportage by Doug Green and the fresh local perspective of our gracious local organizer Chad Fennell. The object of our collection attention today was Drupal's core search module, pictured above (and linking to a PDF) in a visualization of its function call graph. The image is generated by some of the code analysis software I have been playing with over the past few months, and shows some of the complexity and architectural ingenuity involved in this module, largely the brainchild of Steven Wittens.
This has been a great opportunity to learn from and spend good social time with some really generous, smart, and interesting people. People talk about Drupal Rockstars, but today I discovered that both Ernest Berry and Robert Douglass were top-ranked graduates in classical performance (in percussion and French horn, respectively) from the same school. Whatever they're doing there, it sure seems to produce exceptional Drupal developers.
Fuzzy search module author Blake Lucchesi spent a bunch of today working with Chad to provide improved test coverage - something I will also have to bite the bullet on over the next two days. I'm also hoping to pick his brain tomorrow about setting up Komodo with Xdebug, now that he has worked through the difficult details with the assistance of Robert.
I spent the morning helping out with various key issues in the search issue queue, including the search node ranking refactoring patch introduced by Doug. This promises many exciting possibilities, including, for example, the ability to increase a node's search ranking based on the number of times it is clicked through in search results, and implementing multi-factor ranking schemes similar to Flickr's 'interestingness'. I will be posting examples of this at Drupal.org in the next few days.
The afternoon was spent wrestling with some of the very difficult issues involved in distributed search, including how to deal with the asynchronous return of search results. Trying to find appropriate abstractions for the faceted search project by fellow Canadian search sprinter David Lesieur was also fun. I also committed a few bug fixes to Raincity's nascent OAuth module, which provides an implementation of the OAuth distributed authentication protocol. It's still in a rather rough form, but I'm hoping to put it together with search / distributed search to provided authenticated, distributed search across a cloud of federated Drupal sites.
Finally, in a fit of overindulgent enthusiasm, I started a few experiments with caching of Drupal search results. I'm hoping to refine this code, benchmark it, and analyze potential performance improvements under various conditions.
Seen on drupal.org forums: "Site immigration"
Instant classic. I guess the Drupal association will need to start debating about immigration laws very soon. It’s getting critical.
Search Sprint Day One
LIVE FROM THE MINNESOTA SEARCH SPRINT...
The sprint team of Robert Douglass, Blake Lucchesi, Djun Kim, David Lesieur, Chad Fennel, Earnest Berry, and myself, began work at 8am on this uncharacteristically warm sunny May day at the University of Minnesota.
Theming the node form in Drupal 6
The following exercise consists in moving pieces of code around, code that I did not write myself. Credit for the code goes to Joakim Stai (nicknamed 'ximo' on Drupal.org), the maintainer of the excellent Node form layouts module, as well as to the Usability group.
This exercise is all about gaining experience in:
- adding theme settings to a theme configuration page
- theming forms inside a theme, as opposed to writing a module for the same purpose
- creating a sub theme
Join local experts at TeqCorner
Next week, the Phase2 gang will be attending a talk at TeqCorner.
Here is the description:
Enterprise content managers are always under pressure to increase functionality and decrease costs when implementing a content management sytem (CMS). Several open source alternative are available to replace or enhance the current selection of commercial CMS packages. One of the leading open source CMS options today is Drupal.
Exciting changes at Palantir!
Palantir is very excited to announce that Ken Rickard will be joining the Palantir team as of May 19. Ken comes to Palantir after more than a decade managing the development of new technologies, strategy, and innovation in the online newspaper industry. In addition to his community and project work, Ken will provide leadership, vision, and training for Palantir and our clients.
Wanna Play Drupal? I mean Music!
