Drupal Planet

We might finally get more people off of IE, FINALLY.

It might seem like a minor thing, but it isn’t.

Microsoft has been fined billions over browser choice (or lack thereof) in Windows, and the solution that finally satisfied EU regulators was a browser choice screen, which would let users choose a web browser rather then having Internet Explorerinstalled as the default.

Now, Microsoft has posted images of what the browser choice screen will probably look like.

Here’s how it will work: The user will be presented with five major browsers, randomly ordered. He will also be able to choose several additional browsers, which are also randomly ordered. Once you install a browser, you’ll get a shortcut of that browser on your desktop, while Internet Explorer will be unpinned from the taskbar.

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Sometimes we have the challenge to archive an older Drupal website. It is not necessary to have a fully functional interactive archive. For that reason I tried the module HTML Export.

The idea is simple: The module creates a html page for every Drupal page which is visible for a guest.

If you have a multisite installation with a multilingual drupal it's a bit more complicated, because HTML Export doesn't work well with these things :-( I haven't found a real solution for everything but I did the following:

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When you run a lot of drupal sites it can be annoying to keep track of all of the modules contained in a platform and ensure all of them are up to date. One option is to setup a dummy site setup with all the modules installed and email notifications enabled, this is OK, but then you need to make sure you enable the additional modules every time you add something to your platform.

I wanted to be able to check the status of all of the modules in a given platform using the command line. I started scratching the itch by writing a simple shell script to use the drupal updates server to check for the status of all the modules. I kept on polishing it until I was happy with it, there are some bits of which are a little bit ugly, but that is mostly due to the limitations of bash. If I had to rewrite the it I would do it in PHP or some other language which understands arrays/lists and has http client and xml libraries.

The script supports excluding modules by using a extended grep regular expression pattern and nominating a major version of drupal. When there is a version mismatch it will be shown in bolded red, while modules where the versions match will be shown in green. The script filters out all dev and alpha releases, after all the script is designed for checking production sites. Adding support for per module update servers should be pretty easy to do, but I don't have modules to test this with.

To use the script, download it, save it somewhere handy, such as ~/bin/check-module-status.sh, make it executable (run chmod +x ~/bin/check-module-status.sh). Now it is ready for you to run it - ~/bin/check-module-status.sh /path/to/drupal and wait for the output.

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I started to revive urlgreyhot for occasional blogging. I've discovered in the past few months that although I primarily have posts to share on UX, there is still the occasional post that is of topic for Konigi, so I'm now posting again here to discuss working with Drupal once again.

I started reading Travis Tidwell's Flash with Drupal book this month to learn what I can about delivering content from Drupal Views into Flash and will post a short summary in a few days. Packt makes the introduction and Chapter 10 on User Management available as a free download for anyone who wants a taste. What I've been most interested in the past are really modest solutions to things, e.g. creating interactive blocks or widgets of content that I can put in a sidebar. But, my skimming of the book has also gotten me interested in how to deliver more complete Flash widgets in larger portions of the page, e.g. creating dynamically rendered visualizations of content using stats from views and ratings.

Will be posting more as I make it through.

As many know, Drupal 7 will be released once all its critical issues are resolved (currently 150).

I propose that we ask the the folks listed in MAINTAINERS.txt to more actively work down the issues in their respective components. Further, we start holding weekly IRC meetings with these maintainers. In these meetings, hear progress reports and discuss sticky cross-component issues. Transcripts from these meetings would be publicly accessible. I'm OK with ditching the meeting and just doing public progress reports if folks prefer that.

The criticals queue has been culled already. The 150 remaining issues are real, and non trivial. Bazaar like good-will won't get us to the finish line in a timely manner IMO. Just a dash of professionalism will really help here.

If you think you belong in this meeting but aren't in MAINTAINERS.txt, then submit a patch that adds yourself to MAINTAINERS.

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A Capital Region Drupal meetup (the first of it's kind I believe ) is scheduled for March 6th and I hope to be able to talk about authentication and identity. Just a couple of years ago the issue of authentication and identity on Drupal sites was limited to the functions of the Drupal login system. I remember that the first module I ever utilized to improve the login process was LoginToboggan. LoginToboggan adds such nifty features as logging in with name or email address, placing a login form on pages not accessible to anonymous users and much more. It's a great module and I still use it today. Since then we've also seen a few social networks like Twitter and Facebook increase greatly in popularity. So while millions of people create accounts on those services they may not necessarily want to create an account (and have to remember another password) on your Drupal powered site.

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The Drupal association permanent member candidate submissions are due on Monday. Many candidates are applying to be elected as permanent members but I wanted to highlight non-elected members who do a lot to help the Drupal association. This is not an complete list of people who volunteer for the Drupal association, but a sample.

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We've blogged before about the Knowledge management feature package that Pronovix developed for Open Atrium. To make it really easy for you to test out the features, we made a tarball that contains an installation profile that by default will enable all the knowledge management goodness:

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There are plenty Drupal modules that offer ways to upload new files and to attach them to nodes. There's the core upload module, the image module that creates an image content type, filefield that creates a CCK field, ... The options are much more limited when it comes to re-using already uploaded files. You could use a nodereference field or image_attach to link image nodes, or a WYSIWYG plug-in like IMCE, or the WebFM module, and that about covers it.

For a current project in Drupal 6 I was looking for a CCK widget that allowed me to upload new files as well as easily access existing files. Drupal 5 has the asset module and Drupal 7 will have the wonderful media module but for Drupal 6 the options are very limited. After a lot of searching I came across the FileField Sources module. It enhances the filefield module (that allows you to upload new files) by adding a way to import files by url and by adding an autocomplete field to search for existing files. One of its most interesting features for me was the bridge with IMCE. All in all these three extra options allow for an incredible flexibility in file management. And because the selected file eventually ends up in a filefield field it can be plugged into the multitude of modules that support it, such as media mover for instance.

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For the first time ever DrupalCon is proud to offer professional training courses to its attendees. These courses are taught by Drupal experts and cover a wide range of topics ranging from how to build your first Drupal site to how protect yourself from security threats.

When I started Drupal theming in 2004, it was all a bit overwhelming. Back then, the core theme engine was something called Xtemplate, and it gave the impression to the n00b themer of being a great big mess. When you looked at the page template, it was one big blob of markup and logic, and it was very hard to figure out to change just about anything. What's more, it seemed to be very brittle: change something and you got the white screen of death.

And thus life was for the themer through Drupal 4.5 and the beginnings of 4.6.

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Using custom map tiles and open geo data to build a hyper local news tracker

Managing News ships with its maps and geotagging features preconfigured for tracking global news on a world map. But user interface improvements in Managing News Beta 7 make it easy to use an alternate map layer and import custom location data so you can track news in a specific geographic region.

This screencast shows how I was able to tailor my maps to focus on the city of Washington, DC and plot the stories published on various neighborhood blogs. I used open geographic data from the DC government and the DC Nightvision tileset from MapBox.

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Back in May of 2008, I did a survey of 1,370 Drupal sites, and came up with some interesting version statistics. At the time, Drupal 6 had been out for about 3 months, and the adoption rate was still fairly low.

It's been 2 years now since Drupal 6.0 was released, and I thought it would be interesting to revisit the numbers. So, here's a fresh survey of 2,368 Drupal sites:

And here are the numbers from back in 2008:

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Quite a few Drupal modules rely on outside libraries to work. Some are JavaScript based requiring outside plugins and others are based on outside libraries. When users install these modules they, also, have to download and install the outside library. This is a pain that drush make and the Libraries API in modules can help with.

A typical setup will have a drush make file with a project and associated libraries defined within in them. The author who puts together the profile or top level make file will need to know the library and where it needs to go.

A little known feature about drush make files is that all projects can have make files and drush recursively builds each one out. So, if a module has a make file and the module is included in another make file the modules make file will be executed as well.

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One of the most difficult hurdles for new members of the Drupal community to overcome is making the jump from a "user" to a "contributor". Many associate "contributor" with core hackers, PHP gurus, and CSS wizards. In reality, any Drupal user or site builder can easily become a contributor, through support, advocacy, documentation, and so on. For more information, check out the attached slides, or see the Drupal.org Contribution page.

Over the past year I've managed to build up a good collection of Drupal books, but haven't had time to read many of them yet:

When discussing the benefits of open-source frameworks (especially Drupal), I've often heard, "But if everyone has access to the source code, how secure can it possibly be?" My standard response would be to discuss the platforms maturity and how it's been hardened by years of real world use.

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It's no secret that version control on Drupal is hard. Specifically, the problem of iteratively building a site on a staging server, then moving it to a running production system has been the source of countless wasted hours, lost data, pulled hair, blog posts, and modules promising a solution. On Twitter, some would say #drupal #migration #fail.

This post is not the answer to this problem. I just want to show actual code that helps with a small part of it, namely keeping views under version control.

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Join Mike Anello as he talks to Jesse Feiler, the author of Sams Teach Yourself Drupal in 24 Hours from Pearson Education.

Mike and Jesse talk about the beginnings of database-driven web sites, teaching the concepts of Drupal, usability in Drupal, Russians and COBOL (seriously!), and who should really be responsible for your web site.

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With a better core, slicker interface, and stronger community

The Open Atrium Beta 4 release is now available to download. The new release is simpler and easier to use while providing greater flexibility and customizability. Key changes include drag and drop dashboards, a cleaner frontend and admin UI, richer activity streams, and a more efficient feature-building workflow for developers.

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