drupal news

Just as the internet is bigger then 127.0.0.1,Drupal is bigger then Dries. However, every hurd needs a leader and within the Drupal community, Dries has proven that he is not just a good coder but a very wise project lead creating a very rich community around his product, not just around him.

It is the community what makes an Open Source project successful, not the code perse. Bad code can be used in a creative way by a smart community, good code without a community is just same as proprietary software.

And that is why it is good to see that Dries has been chosen as a "Young Innovator". Read the press release at prweb:

"The TR35 honors young innovators for accomplishments that are poised to have a dramatic impact on the world as we know it," said Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review magazine. "We celebrate their success and look forward to their continued advancement of technology in their respective fields."

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Hello,
Please let me know if you would be interested in either or both of the following opportunities in Brooklyn, New York. You can respond back to me at at dcolborne@winterwyman.com or at (617)880-3288.

Opportunity #1
Industry: Software Company
Location: Brooklyn
Length: 3-6 months, ideally contract to hire but will look straight contract

This will be working on their website, and these 2 positions are immediate needs.

Selling Points:
The company was founded by two Rhodes scholars who are passionate about education and technology. They have bright and talented people that are committed to the success of the organization. This fall, approximately 80,000 teachers in 48 states (for over 1 million students) will be using their technology.

We’re looking for significant experience with PHP, Drupal CMS (content management system), as well as wizardry in HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

OPPORTUNITY #2
Location: Brooklyn
Industry: mid-sized interactive (great atmosphere, free coffee, darts, Wii)

Process: usually straight to f2f....immediate need!

Sell the company....they do amazing work. "Everyone we have sent into this place, even people who have worked for a lot of other interactive firms, desperately want to work for these guys. The environment and the work they do is unique, interesting and challenging."

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This tutorial will be split into three parts - part 1 (this part) will explain how to set up the aggregation and import feeds, part 2 (to be published next post) will explain setting up cron to handle auto updating the feeds and will also cover using views to create some different site sections, and part 3 (to be published the post after that) will explain how to theme everything. In the tutorial I will be building a Drupal based sports news aggregation site, but you can obviously tailor this to whatever type of news items you'd like.

The goals:

• Create an aggregation site which aggregates RSS feeds and outputs them in river of news style pages with the most recent news items first.
• Create some different site sections (football and baseball) which only show news items related to that topic.
• Allow users to filter news items by source (e.g. ESPN, BBC etc.).
• Create RSS feeds of our aggregated pages which are available for our users.

You can check out the finished aggregation site (part 1) here.

The set up:
For this tutorial I'll be using the following:

• A clean install of Drupal 5.10 (using Garland)
• SimpleFeed 5.x-2.2
• Views 5.x-1.6

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Lukas Kahwe Smith has an awesome post titled "Open Source is not making enough rich people richer" .
Indeed, there is much talk that the VC's , the Investors and different others aren't seeing the big money fast enough, according to them that is.
Does that mean that the open source industry is going bad ? Does that mean you can't make a living when working in the Open Source industry ?

Absolutely not, as he points out there are uncountable people gaining a good living with Open Source, developers working on the different projects as their day job, system administrators managing open source platforms. We are helping out customers to implement Open Source and Free Software. And there are numerous other Drupal, Mysql, Xen, shops out there. Some have their own open source products and create a business on top of that , others are supporting popular platforms locally.

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German
Hallo Alle, Mitglieder von Austria Groups Drupal Org,

English
Hi all, Members of Austria Groups Drupal Org,

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In the previous post, we saw how to create a XHTML progress bar widget for Forms API, using theme_progress_bar. The next logical step is now to create a graphical equivalent to that progress bar, as an example for far more advanced fully graphical widgets made possible using a similar mechanism.

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The Aten Design Group website has a new look. Well, maybe not an altogether new look, but a revised look. We’ve modified the typography, adjusted the layout, and made some color changes. The blog sports a reversed color scheme, with syntax highlighting for code examples.

The copy has changed, too. We’ve added projects to the portfolio, added text about our technical proficiencies and our iterative process, and added a couple employee profiles.

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The M.I.T. Technology Review has published their annual list of 35 young innovators under the age of 35. The name that jumped out of the page at me was of course Drupal's very own founder, Dries Buytaert:

The Internet has made publishing on a global scale almost effortless. That's the rhetoric, anyway. The truth is more complicated, because the Internet provides only a means of distribution; a would-be publisher still needs a publishing tool. A decade ago, people who wanted such a tool had three choices, all bad: a cheap but inflexible system, a versatile but expensive one, or one written from scratch. What was needed was something in the ­middle, requiring neither enormous expense nor months of development--not a single application, but a platform for creating custom publishing environments. For tens of thousands of sites and millions of users, that something is Drupal....

Head over to the M.I.T. Technology Review site for a full profile on Dries and Drupal written up by Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody).

Rock on Drupal!

To rebuild the menu in Drupal 6 you have to go to admin/build/modules.

In drupal 5 the menu is cached in the cache_menu table, so it is easy to invoke a menu-rebuild by emptying the table with a simple mysql command like TRUNCATE cache_menu;. (I have a handy script that empties all tables starting with cache_).

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Drupal’s block system is far from ideal. It was designed back in the threecolumn-era, was improved to work beyond three-columns-content-in-middle layouts, but is still unsuited for more complex layouts.

If you want real complex layouts, you will have to turn to Panels, or Panels2. Or so they say.

A client of mine, a large Dutch media company uses Drupal for all its new sites -about four, five each month-, and untill today used panels in these sites.

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We were recently approached by a client who wanted to create two sites to serve different audiences but with vast amounts of common content. The same group of people would be responsible for the upkeep of both sites and the desired solution would allow content to be shared with great ease.

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Finding a conference venue with good wifi for hundreds of Drupal geeks is not easy. Since these conferences grew big, it was always a challenge to work out. This year, we also started planning early on ensuring good wifi coverage for the event. Our venue has some wifi coverage, but it was not adequate in itself. We asked for cable based internet for speakers, we set aside a BoF area with switches so if you bring your ethernet cables, you'll be able to plug in and we even ordered a computer cabinet with English speaking setups for those without their laptops.

But to solve good wifi for the Drupal crowd, we needed a professional partner. Thanks to university connections, and our venue's dedicated people, we managed to strike a sponsorship deal with Cisco, so we get the equipment to set up on the broadband university network. People at the university are working hard on configuring the network for us to ensure a good experience over all days of the event.

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This is more a comment to Nedjo's recent post than anything else. Currently http://drupal.org/node/271216 blocks a lot of work -- it is indented to lessen the hardwiredness mentioned in the article and also further testing.drupal.org . It'd be great if people would help with testing the patch -- I admit, not easy but the Drupal.org Testing profile helps you. As the functionalit is mostly API, we need code reviews and coders to write some PHP and see whether they can indeed change the various properties of an issue with a single function call as the patch purports.

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Forgive me, Drupal, for I have sinned. It's been many months since my last confession.

At the Drupal Association we've set upgrading drupal.org as our top priority this year, and much of that work depends on project.*.

The Project module and kin are some of the most important pieces of drupal.org--and some of the most difficult. Six months after Drupal 6 came out, drupal.org still is still running Drupal 5, in large part because project.* is not yet upgraded.

The project modules deliver critical functionality used every day by thousands of Drupal site administrators and developers. The module set has got a lot of great work from maintainers Derek Wright and Chad Phillips and others, notably Adam Light. But - despite significant progress - the codebase is large, uneven, and difficult to maintain.

How did we get to this place? What can we learn from the experience?

I spent a few months some time back contributing to the project module. If the module set is a challenge, I can claim a portion of the credit. Here are my confessions.

I have committed the sin of piling up too much in one place.

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If there is one thing I hate more than breath and martial arts (all kinds...), its writing copy within a php array. So for a recent project that required text-heavy forms, and a bunch of emails, I created an element that mimics php template. The usage and theme function are rather simple: (and rather stolen from phptemplate_render().

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I've written about using drush to evaluate PHP statements in the Drupal context using the command line before, and it turns out that Drush is also quite useful for running Simpletest scripts. Drush comes with a module that allows you to display all the available tests with "drush test list", run all the tests with "drush test run", or run specified tests with "drush test run test1,test2".

'Course, I wanted to run groups of tests and tests matching regular expressions, so I defined two new commands:

drush test run re regular-expression

Run all tests matching a regular expression that uses ereg(..) to match.

Ex: drush test run re Example.*

drush test run group group1,group2…

Run all tests matching the given groups

Ex: drush test run group Example

Here's the patch to make it happen:

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One of the problems with working on a great web framework is one makes assumptions about where the bugs lie. It is much easier to believe that the code I've written has a bug than that framework has a bug. Compounding the problem when you check out a website like Drupal.org and don't find a mention of the problem that perhaps you're the only one who has ever had the problem.

Such is the way I spent the morning. Working on a site and watching chunks of hair turn grey while searching for my mistake. Then in the latter stages of testing, having eliminated my code and all the modules that one starts to look at Drupal Core with a questioning eye. And that is when I found the bug, with comments and all, hanging out in the node module.

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In April 2008 the Vancouver League of Drupalers featured a presentation on email newsletters by Monique Trottier of Boxcar Marketing titled: Email Newsletters: WTF?, and an overview of the Simplenews module by yours truly.

The video of Monique's presentation turned out well and can be viewed with complete show notes at Email Newsletters: WTF? (6 Mistakes to Avoid), or by watching the embedded video below. It's filled with practical information and a must-see for anyone serious about using newsletters.

My presentation didn't video so well, so here's the recreated notes:

Simplenews is a module that adds newsletters to Drupal. It has the following major features:

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At the MIT Mobile Experience Lab, we are doing a lot of interesting projects to connect people more with the places they visit, the people they know (or don't know), and information, with an emphasis on helping people while they are mobile. Since an increasing number of mobile people carry mobiles, a lot of my work has been working on ways to create connection by using a cellphone.

Lately in particular I have been working with SMS. The SMS Framework for Drupal is pretty awesome, but we needed better two-way communication. We aren't trying to just let people post to a Drupal site via SMS, we needed to be able to send commands to Drupal via SMS to trigger activity in the site and receive feedback.

I drew a lot of the design for my SMS actions from my experience working with the Services module and it functions in a very similar way. Contrib modules register their own actions (keywords which are triggered off the first word of an incoming SMS) and specify callback methods for those actions. The callbacks then process the text and can fire back responses to the user or simply just perform some action in the system.

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I’m the first of the Development Seed crew to head out for Hungary, and I have to say I’m excited. I left Washington, DC on Friday for Vienna to have a week of vacation and visiting with friends and family. Then it’s time to hit the DrupalCon circuit again.

There are many sessions I’m looking forward to. Rasmus, the creator of php, shocked us al in Sunnyvale and I’m sure he has some new surprises for us in Szeged. Robert Douglas is leading a talk I’m particularly interested in on the future of search. We’ve been looking into alternatives to Drupal’s search, and it would be great to have a better solution in Drupal itself. Other session’s that I’m excited for are:

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