By Robin Monks on

Welcome once again to the Drupal Newsletter! You’ll be happy to know we haven’t had to cut back for the summer (although the heat has made us slightly slower ;-) ).
The important news this month is our large scale outage lasting over 3 days which caused a severe disruption in the Drupal services. We are happy to say we are back on track now, and with even more services on the horizon!
It appears our downtime was a blessing in disguise. We raised over $10,000 USD in addition to in-kind donations of services and servers, and we set up a long term hosting plan for Drupal.org with OSL!
All of us at Drupal want to give our heart-felt thanks to those in the community who took it upon themselves to donate. Your donations will keep Drupal happily hosted for the foreseeable future.
Of course, Drupal has had lots of smaller announcements this month, including a restyled handbook, a wedding announcement, a security release and a Drupal UK meetup.
In all the summer rush, don’t forget to contribute to the Drupal Newsletter! Your contributions keep the Drupal Newsletter fresh and exciting, all year long!
There’s a lot to catch up on this month, and it all starts...right now.

Robin Monks,
Editor

In this issue...

Upcoming Events – Find out what events are coming up for Drupal lovers.
Drupal Interview – This month’s interview with Gerhard Killesreiter (killes).
Drupal Development Quickies – What have the developers thought up this month?
Server Infrastructure – Get an inside viewpoint on the upcoming server upgrades.
Drupal Tips – How to make Drupal do things you didn’t think it could.
Site Spotlight – Find out how Next Billion uses CivicSpace/Drupal!
Drupal Sightings – Showcasing some of the best new Drupal sites around the world!

Upcoming events

OSCON Portland August 1-5, 2005

Join us at the O'Reilly Open-Source Conference 2005 to learn about Drupal. For those who are not going to attend OSCON itself, we are organizing a free, offsite Drupal conference at Portland State University which we are calling Portland 2005 Drupal Conference. The Portland 2005 Drupal Conference will be in 2 parts. Part 1 (informational, for users and newbies) on Tuesday August 2 and Part 2 on Saturday August 6th (for technical people and coders).

When: August 1 to August 8, 2005.
Where: Portland, Oregon, USA.

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Drupal interview

This month I’ll (Robin Monks) be interviewing a rather well known Drupal developer, Gerhard Killesreiter (more often known as killes). You can view his advertisement page on Drupal.org.

Robin: What do you feel will be coming up for users in Drupal 4.7?

Gerhard: Well, you know as well about the goodies in cvs as well as me.
I hope that my revision system will finally make it. Also the form rewrite is important.

RM: How do you feel about having JavaScript in the Drupal core?

GK: Not too bad. I am known as an anti-JS zealot, but I was actually the first of the core developers to have a module with JS. ;) So, as long as it degrades gracefully I am ok with it.

RM: So, you mentioned a revision system, could you share some more about this with our readers?

GK: Well, it will bore the readers to death. ;)
There won't be much visible change from the outside.

The problem is that currently the revisions are stored in a serialized field. That is a) programmatically not very clean and b) if you have many revisions it will break.

RM: Ok, so how will this help administrators and developers?

GK: Admins will have the benefit that I also added the "log" field, which is currently reserved for book nodes, to the node table, making it generally available. Also, the logs are stored alongside the revision they belong to allowing for better workflow. This opens up more possibilities for future modules as well.

RM: Nice :) So, what are your expectations for 4.7?

GK: Expectations, don't know. I certainly hope that we can release it rather sooner than later. We are currently down to two releases per year, I want four. Not all if those would be as feature-laden, but that would be ok.

RM: Where do you think the Drupal developer community is going in the future?

GK: I really don't know what we will do; there are so many ideas (and so little time).

RM: So where is the most development time being spent?
GK: Testing and bug hunting, unfortunately.
People often think that programming is about adding features, but this is not true. More often than not you happily program along and then suddenly you find something which looks odd and you want to fix it, and all of a sudden half a day is gone.

RM: OK, so most time is going to Quality Assurance then.

GK: Well, QA is a bit more than just testing; at least I think it is. Most people don't really do QA; there is simply no time, or no interest.

RM: Are there still some big features in the works?

GK: Adrian is working on the form rewrite (which is really important). The reason why it is important is that in fact both of the security releases we had to do were related to the forms we build. The XML-RPC thing was just a third party module we did not look too much at, but the form stuff was our own code.
So, this irks me quite more than the XML-RPC thing.

RM: I see. How will SoC fit in with new feature development and bug fixes?

GK: Well, the SoC work is mostly contributed modules, so it isn't really relevant for core, and I suspect there won't be many bug fixes for core coming from it. But otherwise I expect to see some very nice developments coming from it. We all had wanted a ToDo.module or a webDAV.module.
I think it is pretty exciting that the Drupal project will receive this enormous 55000 USD donation. Most of the money of course goes to the students, but the code will be available for Drupal.

RM: OK, you have personally been involved with CivicSpace coding lately, how do you see CS impacting Drupal in the coming months?

GK: I haven't been involved too much with CS before, so it is a bit difficult to see what will happen, but I think it is a good thing that all their developers have moved development to Drupal.org. United we will rule! ;)

RM: OK, any last words for our readers?

GK: Hmm. Maybe every reader could fix a bug? That would be great. :)
http://drupal.org/project/issues?projects=3060&states=1&categories=bug
Plenty of bugs, free choice.

RM: OK :) Thanks for you time! Keep on coding!

GK: Yeps. :)

Drupal development quickies

This month the quickies are shorter than usual, it is summer after all and we had a very long outage and alas security problems to tackle.

Thox renamed 'light' and 'dark' to 'odd' and 'even' in drupal.css. Check your style sheets.

Thox continues to shower us with cool JS features, this time he introduced collapsible form groups.

chx has changed the way Drupal is initialized. It's much easier now to write supplemental scripts for using parts of Drupal in another app just because you like some part of API.

Ber moved user and node settings under -- surprise! -- Settings.

chx replaced the old XML-RPC library with a smaller/better/working one.

As usual, small bugfixes and enhancements are in.

Thanks for OSU OSL, the donators and Sun Microsystems for providing Drupal with a new home (I am pretty sure this will be repeated elsewhere in the newsletter, but hey, you deserve it!)

Karoly Negyesi,
http://drupal4hu.com/

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Server infrastructure going forward

Currently Drupal.org is hosted on a single server that shares space with 23 sites. Due to the phenomenal response from the community, enough funds were raised to purchase more than one replacement server. Sun also stepped up and provided a free Sun Fire V20z server. Discussions with Open Source Labs and Firebright have resulted in a core architecture that will provide for a solid foundation going forward. Three Dell PowerEdge 1850 servers are being purchased to supplement the Sun Fire V20z.

The architecture that will be implemented for now will have the Sun Fire V20z server dedicated to hosting the database. Two of the Dell 1850's will act as front end application servers sharing the load with round robin DNS. The third Dell will host CVS (possibly SVN in the future as well) and all the mail services for drupal.org. Traditional industry standard daily backups will continue, only now those backups will be to an OSL backup server. This architecture is time tested across many OS platforms and will get us up and going quickly.

Moving forward, the next step is to look into implementing Linux Virtual Server for increased availability and redundancy. This roadmap will get a strong, reliable infrastructure in place quickly and establishes a next step in the path moving forward.

See this post for more details.

Contributed by,
Steven Peck

Dupal tip

Mission Statement

Is your site or community not growing as fast as you'd like? Perhaps first-time visitors are having a hard-time figuring out what your site is about. Why not catch your visitors' attention with a short and clear mission statement? Go to administer -> settings to enter a mission statement, then go to 'administer -> themes -> configure' and make sure its display is toggled on.

Contributed by,
Steven Wittens

You can get more tips from Bryght’s “Best Practices” section.

Site spotlight

Next Billion.net's primary goal is to identify and discuss sustainable business models that address the needs of the world's poorest citizens. The site focuses on providing news and networking members of the international development community. They use the CivicSpace distribution of Drupal as a development community portal with over 450 members to act a giant water cooler. They are recognized as having some of the best daily news briefs summarizing development projects in the media. They also make good use of their theme on the profile module that allows users to network with people working in the development field or looking to fund projects.

In addition to the modules provided in the base distribution NextBillion makes use of several modules from Drupal contributions. To assist in protecting their site they use the spam module to stop unwanted comments and the captcha module to ensure real humans are creating accounts and not malicious computer programs. NextBillion manages their content using the excerpt module to add a separate teaser for their posts, the scheduler module to allow for future publishing/unpublishing of posts. If you want to help NextBillion please visit their user list to find a project or person you like to collaborate with. You can also help NextBillion by contributing to Drupal and ensuring that they continue to get powerful community plumbing to address the needs of the world's poorest citizens.

Contributed by,
CivicSpace Labs

Drupal sightings

Each passing month finds us with more great Drupal powered websites to share with you, and this month we’d like to point out some of these sites for your enjoyment.

Gwenview
Gwenview is “a fast and easy to use image viewer for KDE”. They use Drupal nicely for the main site and to provide powerful features to their users.

Mr PHP
Mr PHP has used Drupal to power its open source and commercial services and forums. As a bonus, they’ve created a non-standard home layout.

Threadwatch
Threadwatch is “a community website focused on Internet marketing and related technologies”. They have used Drupal to create a rich Slashdot style blogging site.

Drupal Powered Lives
Of course, we'd like to see more Drupal sightings, so why not be a Drupal sighting yourself? This CafePress store can get you started with a Drupal shirt, jacket, or mug...

For more information about Drupal, visit our website at http://drupal.org

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