Planet Drupal

Just as I completed my MsC last year at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), I've been asked to go give context and advice on the possibility of using Drupal with people at the Central European University in Budapest. They were looking at content management systems such as Plone and Drupal and were trying to scope their work and the possibilities they have for converting to an Open Source system. I gave them details on Drupal: some of the key components available, high profile sites using the system, support options they have, the rate of progress within the community, and they were impressed.

I almost forgot about this before they got back to me recently saying that they choose Drupal and would like to publicize their job offer for an in-house Drupal consultant, who could help migrate their data, bootstrap their work and educate other team members on Drupal. Now that Drupal 6 is shining brighter with CCK and Views out in full force, there is no question they are planning to use Drupal 6.

Their job offer is now posted on Drupal.hu, so if you are interested, drop them your CV and cover letter: http://drupal.hu/forum/full-time-drupal-developer-central-european-unive... They are looking for applications until November 30th, before they close up with the application deadline.

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Last but not least, we're going to look at:

• Spam Control
• XML Sitemap to help with search engine optimization
• Setup Metatagging
• Human Readable (and search engine readable) URLs
• Fivestar rating on content
• ServiceLinks to allow for social bookmarking

Spam Control

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Earlier today I took the one and half hour train ride up to Philly to attend the first DrupalCamp for that fine city. I hope they have more! Big thanks to the organizers, Nathan and Alex. It was very well put together and the venue was great. There were about 100 people there and I got to catch up with some friends and meet lots of new faces. I was slated to do two sessions, Contributing to Drupal and then a doc sprint. I got into town a little bit late and was not on top of my game, fighting off the remnants of my flu bug. Jeff Miccolis of Development Seed kicked off the session until I got in the door and set up (thanks Jeff!) and then we ended up doing one good long session on contributing. There were lots of good questions and conversation. My slides are pretty spare, to be used more as points to talk about, but I did have handy URLs to get more information on topics, so I've uploaded a PDF of them here. Everyone should feel free to use these in their own presentations and modify them up. Anything that spreads the good word of Drupal is alright by me. ;-)

Doing a good wiki in Drupal 6 is surprisingly hard. My project to create a site with MediaWiki-like functionality for climate research at UC Berkeley took much longer than I thought it would, and the result was mediocre. Here are my notes evaluating different modules:

Modules I ended up using

• Talk (6.x-1.5)
  • Function: Move the comments into separate tab.
  • Configure: Enable in Content Type -> edit -> Workflow settings (which is odd, should be Comment settings).
• Diff (6.x-2.0)
  • Function: Show what changed between one revisions.

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When themeing your view in Drupal 6, you have the ability to override the default templates. Depending on the “Style” and the “Row Style” attributes that you assign your view, different options are available to you. If you choose a “Node” row style, you can take advantage of a special template suggestion.

You can create a .tpl file in your theme directory with the following naming scheme:
node-view-VIEWNAME.tpl.php

This template will be used to render each node in the view.
It works almost the same as node-NODE TYPE.tpl.php but only for the view that you have specified.

The Drupal markup filtering system is confusing for a couple of reasons:

• The terms “format” and “filter” are used inconsistently. For example, the main admin page is title “Input formats”, but the url is “admin/settings/filters”. The best I can do is: The markup filter system consists of multiple input formats which are ordered stacks of individual filters.
• The term “Input format” itself is misleading, because the filters work on output, not input.
• The “Input format” admin page is unhelpful and hard to navigate.

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OpenSourcery has long respected how our friends at NTEN -- the Nonprofit Technology Network -- help good organizations improve their understanding and use of technology, so you can understand why we're ecstatic to collaborate with them. Our first collective effort will help managers, CEOs, and community organizers get the most from Drupal. In what we hope becomes a long-standing effort, our developers will work with NTEN members to unwrap the many joys of open source applications.

Instead of repeating the webinar details here, I encourage readers to visit the event page on NTEN's website and let us know what you think. You can also learn the benefits of becoming a member of NTEN here.

OpenSourcery thanks Anna, Holly, and the rest of the NTEN team for making this webinar a reality. We look forward to working together.

Thank you for reading.

Drupal 6 has a few problems with large numbers of nodes.

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I recently suggested that the way we approach new development is the most important factor in determining the long term value of our work. But just how can developers using Drupal make the most of open source by ensuring that participating and contributing is an essential part of our daily workflow?

Here are some practical tips that come out of our experience at CivicActions and that can guide you in deciding how to approach new development to get the full benefit of open source. Read on as well for a discussion of patching vs. hacking vs. forking and of how to get attention for your patches.

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When developing in Drupal, should we hack something together that's specific to a site? Or should we instead take the time to do things "right" by improving existing modules or writing our own new modules to contribute to the community? When is one of these options better than the other? How do we decide?

It's a key set of questions. All but the most basic projects will require some level of new development. The way we approach this new development is probably the most important factor in determining the long term value of our work, both for us and for our clients.

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Information Week has an article that looks at how success has been achieved by Drupal and Alfresco by integrating social and collaboration features into the products.

The article compares both platforms favorably to large commercial products from the likes of Microsoft and IBM and finds that businesses are frequently evaluating open source platforms along side proprietary packages and choosing based on their requirements, not on a political or ideological basis.

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Coder Tough Love is a companion to the existing Coder module by Doug Green, and its initial development has been sponsored by Trellon. Unlike Coder, which strives to follow the documented style guidelines of Drupal core, Coder Tough Love takes the tougher tactic of applying finely aged and obsessively anal wisdom from years of Drupal development and persnickety quality control.

Part of the reason for this module's creation was to obsess over my own code: I claim no higher standard than myself, but even I am infinitely fallible. Likewise, as chx and I wrote Drupal Tough Love reviews, we found ourselves repeating suggestions from module to module, and a few of our critiques could have been automated, leaving us to focus on more important design issues. You should expect some false positives with Coder Tough Love, but I'd still want you to report them as bugs so I can continue to tighten the analysis.

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Long over due, the first release of the Drupal 6 version of Media Mover is finally out. While there are several modules in the suite that are not finished in porting or fully tested, the core modules are ready for daring people to try out at this point. Please read the release notes which have some information about which modules are functional.

Image via Wikipedia

Happy Birthday Dries!  Have a peice of virtual cake, and enjoy your birthday!

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Palantir is pleased to announce the recent launches of two new Drupal-based higher education Web sites: The Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame and the Northwestern University Alumni Association.

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During our retreat in Playa Del Carmen MEX over the summer, Jacob Singh (now a CivicActions Alumnus, Class of 2008) showed and explained to me a project he was working on to create a hosted Solr Search service for Drupal. Solr (via the Solr Integration module written and maintained by Robert Douglas) provides a method to bring very robust faceted search to Drupal sites. A few weeks ago, Jacob went to work with Acquia in order to bring this product to the masses. Read about Acquia's hosted Solr Search plans.

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Putting your content on a highly custom map is now as quick and as easy as putting those same nodes in a list. That’s because the Nice Map module can do the heavy lifting for you by acting as a WMS client that integrates with Views. A WMS – or Web Mapping Service – is a standard that lets applications like websites request a map from a mapping server. Using the WMS standard gives you the flexibility to use a public WMS server or to use your own mapping server where you have complete control over the maps, which is what we’ve been doing recently for our custom mapping work.

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It's a little late in posting, but here is a presentation we put together for the September NOVA Drupal Meetup. This presentation outlines some strategies for implementing effective SEO on a Drupal site.