Info Drupal

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be teaching my first live telecourse on Monday, 29 March, "Setting Up, Customizing Drupal", for Environments for Humans. My three-hour course is in the morning, with Sheena Donnelly teaching "Drupal Theme Building" in the afternoon.

Most Drupal people know me for my Lynda.com video courses. I'm no stranger to live teaching: One of my first jobs was teaching secretaries how to use Radio Shack TRS-80 (!) computers when I was 16. (Yes, I'm that old. ;) ) I presented at a lot of tech conferences during the boom, and later taught real estate courses for City College of San Francisco and a private company.

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After learning about Disqus this week, I became quite enamored of it. Drupal's comment system is swell and all, but I know that I don't have time to set it up as to be as nifty as it could be. So I think it's swell if someone wants to take it off my hands for free. The downside is that if I upgrade to D7, I wouldn't get those swell forthcoming RDF-a comments. But there's a Disqus API, so I can solve that later if it's important to me.

The problem is that having both Disqus and comments enabled makes things confusing. Each post has a link at the bottom with '13 comments 13 comments and 0 Reactions' or something similar. Not swell. I don't want to abandon my existing comments--in particular, my Puppet vs Chef and SPARQL posts got good feedback from their respective communities. The Puppet post is #1 on Google for 'puppet vs chef' largely because the authors of both projects commented there. Hopefully, Disqus would let people track those authors to comments on my site in the future.

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On March 12, 2010, I will be online with the folks from Tek-X giving a webcast on A Developer's Intro to Drupal. If you're just getting your feet wet with Drupal and are still a little confused about hooks, modules, themes, nodes, or even why Drupal isn't (fully) Object-Oriented, then this session is for you.
Tek-X Drupal Webcast

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Inspired by the State of Rob Loach Address, I decided I don't particularly want to let a year go by without blogging, especially considering I don't have the excuse that I'm micro-blogging. So without further ado, here's what I've been up to this month:

• Media module, of course. Though I'm not in the swing I was in January. I've worked some on an experimental browser that allows more FAPI magic than the current one that's a Javascript framework (which is thus largely inaccessible to many Drupal developers, though comes with its own advantages). Other than that, it's just been some code clean up.
• Embedded Media Field now supports RTMP streaming servers. Also, Media: YouTube has been ripped from the dev-2 version of it, and now supports iPhone. (I can't really take credit for either of these new features, other than for committing the patches, but it makes it look like I've actually been working...)
• I started a new blog.

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Here's a quick tip for people running multiple Drupal instances on one server: don't run cron for all sites on the same moment but try to spread it.

Suppose I have 5 sites: site1.tld, site2.tld, ... and I want to run cron each 12 hours. I would enter the following using crontab:

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Currently the Migrate module doesn't support full migration of poll nodes. When the poll module is enabled, you can create a content set mapping for a poll node, but you are unable to set the poll status (active or closed) and, more importantly, you can't migrate the poll choices.

Using the hook_migrate_prepare_node() and hook_migrate_complete_node() hooks, I was able to migrate all choices for each node, along with all existing votes stored.

In the example below, I am migrating polls from a Joomla MySQL database and I am using a poll content set which handles the core node field mapping, including the question text.

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To better tag content in multilingual versions of Managing News

We just added support for Yahoo! Placemaker's geo-recognition service to Managing News. This is an optional replacement for the default place-term lookup feature and can be enabled and configured in the administration section of Managing News. For those new to automatic geotagging services, Placemaker is a free API that leverages Yahoo's GeoPlanet location database to identify where in the world a particular piece of content is relevant.

Here is a look at Managing News using Placemaker to tag content in Chinese:

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To be successful, larger Drupal sites face key issues of site performance and scalability. This webinar is targeted at managers and developers who are trying to get the most out of a Drupal site. We'll discuss common Drupal performance bottlenecks and a number of techniques to dramatically improve site performance. A detailed review of recent performance and stress testing will highlight PHP optimizations specific to Drupal as well as the popular Pressflow extensions.

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For 40 years, scientists have searched for a way to bring nuclear fusion to the masses. If successful in bringing fusion online, we all could have an inexhaustible form of power to meet our world's energy needs. The promise of fusion is a dream that many have hoped to see become a reality in their lifetime.

Perhaps not for as noble of cause, Drupal users have sought better themes for their Drupal sites. Four years ago, it seemed to me that creating a good theme for Drupal was almost done as an afterthought. There simply were not too many places for a user to go for a quality Drupal theme. I recall spending a lot of wasted time maintaining my own (boring) themes for Drupal sites. The Drupal days of version 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 and even 4.7 for themes were dark days indeed. Luckily, Drupal 5 introduced us to a new theme called Garland. Garland may not have been a perfect theme but in my opinion the theme marked the beginning of an era for a new style of Drupal themes.

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Nate Haug, Jeff Eaton, Addi Berry, Karen Stevenson, Jerad Bitner, and Dave Burns join Jeff Robbins to talk about the latest Drupal news and try to figure out how to pronounce certain Old Norse words.

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Ever wanted to implement or alter meta tags on a custom page or a view? As most of you would have already heard of the excellent nodewords 6.x-1.11 (module which allows users to define their own meta tags for nodes and much more), we will use some of the very useful API functions of this module.

You can actually use the nodewords API to alter, inject and define your own meta data on virtually any page.

Say you have a view and you want to dynamically set the meta tags for that view? easy..

Step 1: Implement the hook_nodewords_tags_alter() hook

Following Kevin Hankens post on why you shouldn't ignore Drupal 404 errors, I decided to go through yesterdays error_log on our live apache server (the one which hosts www.pponline.co.uk, www.sportbusiness.com and www.mychild.co.uk alongside around 40 other dupral sites).

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After well over 1,000 hours of development and thanks to the help of many legendary open source engineers, Chapter Three is proud to announce the release of PANTHEON Mercury 1.0, the quick-start server environment for those looking for the best in Drupal performance. You can launch Mercury now with our free Amazon Machine Images (AMI) or follow our install instructions yourself using any Debian Jaunty server. Commercially supported hosting options will be announced in the coming weeks.

What is Mercury?

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A recent CNet article notes that such shops as AF83 have been turning away business because they can't keep up with demand. That's a familiar story to many of us, including me: Drupal is just growing and growing, and we're reaping the benefits and challenges.

But consider the other side of that coin, expressed by the article's title: "Need a job? Learn Drupal." If the message gets through, the Drupal community will experience a wave of people driven by practical matters of employment. A few minutes in Drupaldom's current hangouts -- IRC, drupal.org, mailing lists -- predicts how such an influx will clash with the existing culture.

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Drupal makes your life very easy, but that's no excuse for being lazy. While profiling scripts today, I ran into something that, for whatever reason, never clicked before. I was running Xdebug and KCachegrind on some complex pages to get an idea where I could optimize. Xdebug has a profiler built in that creates files digestible by something like KCachegrind. With profiling on, you get a profile dump file for every PHP script you run. You can in-turn open that file with KCachegrind to get some helpful analysis.

Profiling is a great way to expose those problems that I often ignore...

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NOTE: This Drupal Voices podcast was recorded at DrupalCon Paris back in September of 2009. Now that our latest training video on Drupal Module Development is out the door, then I should have more time to put out the remaining Drupal Voices interviews.

George DeMet is the founder and co-owner of Palantir.net. At DrupalCon Paris, DeMet led a panel discussion talking about converting Foreign Affairs magazine over to Drupal. DeMet touches on some of the highlights of functionality for the site and the Palantir team that built it. Palantir also took the time to write up a very comprehensive case study over on Drupal.org back in August that goes into a lot more detail. Finally, DeMet talks about how they transitioned from a regular development shop that produced their own CMS to working much more closely with Drupal.

Every other week or so, someone asks me the following question: How are Mollom CAPTCHAs better than those created by CAPTCHA module?. This is an important question, and understanding it is central to understanding our philosophy with Mollom.

First, when using Mollom in "text analysis" mode, a CAPTCHA is only displayed when Mollom is uncertain about whether a message could be spam. Mollom analyzes the text of comments and combines that analysis with what it knows about the internal reputation of the posters, to determine whether a message is "spammy". Non-spam submissions are accepted without a CAPTCHA, and posts that are certainly spam are rejected automatically. By only presenting a CAPTCHA when necessary, we avoid penalizing normal (non-spamming) users with CAPTCHA challenges. The CAPTCHA module is different in that it does not perform text analysis and therefore must always display a CAPTCHA challenge.

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Even where SaaS companies let customers take back their data, they often don't let them take the code underlying it, Dries Buytaert of Drupal and Acquia wrote in a blog post. by Dana Blankenhorn

THANK YOU… to the 25,000+ business owners, developers, and site builders using a theme made by TopNotchThemes. Your feedback (both positive and not-so-positive!) has enabled us to create this incredible new way of building the face of Drupal sites

THANK YOU… to the 4,000+ people who are already using Fusion and have filed issues, bug reports, and patches

THANK YOU… to our incredible team, for rising to the challenge of creating the most advanced Drupal themes on the planet

THANK YOU… to the Drupal community, for being such a smart, creative, and fascinating group of people

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When you're creating a social site you want to make it as easy as possible for new users to register. Or even better: have them log in with one of their existing accounts so they don't have to go through yet another registration process and have yet another account to maintain. OpenID goes a long way in doing this, but people that are less tech savvy might not be familiar with it and you don't want them to read through a page of documentation just to sign up. Just an example: most users don't realize they can enter the url of their Google profile and use it as an OpenID url.

However, most users that participate in social networking sites already own a Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or Blogger account. Services like Gigya (which is completely free) and RPX (which includes a free plan) provide an easy way for users to register on your site by logging in with one of their existing accounts. Gigya created a Gigya Socialize module for easy integration with Drupal. As a site admin all you need to do is sign up on Gigya (using one of your own accounts) and create an API key for your site. Enter this API key in the module configuration page and you're ready to go.

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