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Tomorrow is big day for the Acquia webinar program - the first webinars to offer access to attendees running Linux OS on their local machines. We have two sessions tomorrow with Dries Buytaert and Jeff Noyes on Drupal 7 entitled "Making Drupal 7 Simple to Use for Everyone" - one at 9am EST, 2pm UTC and then a second at 2:30pm EST, 11:30am PST, 7:30pm UTC for people on the West Coast.

Advances in administration, performance, and extensibility for a better mapping platform

OpenLayers 2.0-alpha1 has been released, and there is a clear upgrade path from both 0.x and 1.x. I want to share some advances for administration, performance, and extensibility that have been made during the past couple months to give everyone a sense of what this means for Drupal as a serious mapping platform. For those new to the OpenLayers module, it's an interface that works with the OpenLayers javascript library to provide interactive maps similar to the Google Maps API, but with a completely open source stack and many more opportunities for customization.

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Yes, you heard it right! I'm not going to Drupalcon after all -- it's too close to the due date of our next baby. As much as I'd like to go (Drupalcons really are all that), I would be mortified to miss the birth of a daughter, if she decided to come in to the world a little early.

I'm going to give my ticket to a worthy participant in exchange for a couple of hours of review of the Media module. (Don't worry if you're not a developer or know how to patch or anything -- many of the issues are around usability, so we appreciate all levels of review.) Just contact me off-list if you're interested. You'll still be responsible for travel, though you might be able to find sponsorship for that as well if you act quickly.

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Often I see people asking what are some simple things I can do to get better rankings in search engines. Well with Drupal one thing you can do is a no brainer. Every Drupal site that cares about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) must first enable clean URLs and second must install Path Auto. For those of you who don’t know what these are let me elaborate just a bit.

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Last week, Matt Farina tossed me a question about the best approach to introspecting code in PHP, particularly in relation to whether or not the situation was a good candidate for using PHP's Reflection API. The original (now outdated) patch he gave me as an example had the following block of code in it:

<?php
$interfaces = class_implements($class);
if (isset($interfaces['JSPreprocessingInterface'])) {
$instance = new $class;
}
else {
throw new Exception(t('Class %class does not implement interface %interface', array('%class' => $class, '%interface' => 'JSPreprocessingInterface')));
}
?>

I've used Reflection happily in the past. I've even advocated for it in situations where I later realized it was the totally wrong tool for the job. But more importantly, I'd accepted as 'common knowledge' that Reflection was slow. Dog-slow, even. But Matt's question was specific enough that it got me wondering just how big the gap ACTUALLY was between the code he'd shown me, and the Reflection-based equivalent. The results surprised me. To the point where I ended up writing a PHP microbenching framework, and digging in quite a bit deeper.

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Earlier today NTEN released the 2009 Data Ecosystem Survey Report (you need to be an NTEN member or pay $50 to access this report). Long time users might remember that CiviCRM came out on top in the 2007 NTEN CRM Satisfaction Survey. Some of the tweets about this survey include:

• @pearlbear: GPA on Donation Managment from #nten report: CiviCRM:3.85, Salesforce:3.67, Raiser's Edge:3.62, DIA:3.25, Convio:3.22.
• @geilhufe: CiviCRM gets straight As in 5/8 parts of an NPO's data ecosystem (NTEN Data Ecosystems
• @geilhufe: CiviCRM far ahead of competition yet again in independent Report
• @civicactions: Nice marks for @civicrm in the #NTEN 2009 Data Ecosystem Survey

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Fosdem 2010 was my 10th fosdem Edition (including the first OSDEM)
As every year Fosdem suffered even more from it's own success.

On Friday evening ther was the obligatory Beer event... however as people need to eat to .. the Devops crowd fled the scene

I had made reservations for a 20 something group and with the CentOS crowd joining us (as there was some overlap anyhow) we were 25 when we arrived in the restaurant .

Dinner and Discussions were great .. I learned about some new projects and we had some insightfull dicussions on how fat your thin foil should be ...

After dinner we went back to the Beer Event were lots of Free Beer was tasted ...

Saturday was the first full day of Fosdem, as usual Fosdem was the victim of it's own success , too much interresting stuff to see .. too little time.

Lots of Devrooms had the "FULL" sign put up more than you want as a visitor ...
I never even made it into the Drupal or NoSQL rooms :(

Sadly I had to correct Ploum's first law but for a lot of people .. Fosdem each time means the battle choosing which presentation you'll go to ... If you can even make it to the talk .. as usually the the hallway track is much more interresting :)

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After I spent THREE HOURS trying to figure out why IE insists on rendering a white background for an empty iframe, Nate pointed this little gem out to me.

IE has default values for iframes. Yes they do. And the default is to put an opaque background and an inset border on iframes that will ignore any attempt you make to change the iframe background color or border using css. So if you put 'background-color:transparent' into your css for the iframe element it will have no effect. That's right IT WILL IGNORE YOUR CSS!

To fix it you have to do this:

<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameBorder="0"></iframe>

See the documentation for this stupid behavior here

- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533072%28VS.85%29.aspx
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533770%28VS.85%29.aspx

CCK is a great module for allowing use to create custom content types without having to write a node module. Out of the box CCK provides everything a user would want. But there are times where I need to do some custom queries or add a custom theme function to get things just right. So here's something I like to do to keep things well and organized.

The best way to do this would be to copy the content-field.tpl.php from the CCK theme directory into your own theme directory. This will target ALL fields, but you'd like to modify onlt that one text field in that one content type. Well, you'd start off again by moving the content-field.tpl.php to your theme directory, and then create a copy of this file with the following schema:

content-field-FIELD_NAME-NODE_TYPE.tpl.php

If you'd like to modify a field that spans across multiple content types, you could use the following naming convention:

content-field-FIELD_NAME.tpl.php

I have been hitting my head against a wall for a few weeks now, trying to get a few different Views-created pages to appear as if they were normal pages inside an Organic Group (meaning they would appear inside og-menu-enabled menus for that particular group, and group blocks would also appear on the pages.

After reading up on the thread "Organic Groups and Views 2", I found that I could use an argument to help solve my dilemma. Here's how I set up an argument for a particular view:

On the page display (I could've also done this as a default), I added an argument ("Organic groups: Group node") with the following properties:

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Asynchronous HTTP And HTML or AHAH is a technique which allows you to update parts of a DOM without reloading the entire page. In Drupal, AHAH refers to adjusting forms dynamically by changing a part of a form based on input given in other form elements without a page reload.

While Drupal 5 was downright lacking support for AHAH driven forms, it became part of the FAPI in Drupal 6. Module developers are able to design dynamic forms without worrying about writing complex JQuery. Yet, implementing and debugging AHAH in a secure and maintainable fashion is still tricky business.

Back when I was first starting to look at different Content Management Systems (CMS) one of the reasons I decided to go with Drupal was because I heard from different people that it was much more Search Engine Friendly (SEF) when compared to the other CMS’s out there. This excited me not because I was an SEO expert but precisely the opposite – because I knew SEO was valuable but didn’t know what it meant to optimize my sites.

Since then I have learned much more about Search Engine optimization and I have come to two conclusions:

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The World Bank has many websites and a varied online presence and some are running Drupal. Their climate change site, http://beta.worldbank.org, which launched a few months ago uses Drupal. The site serves as a beta for the new content strategy the Bank would like for the future: an integrated model of publishing around shared topics, countries, and products to achieve greater audience reach and satisfaction. This site takes a single topic: "climate change", and aggregates World Bank content from a variety of sources in an automated fashion.

The World Bank's mission is to reduce global poverty and improve living standards. It serves as a vital source of financial and technical assistance to developing countries around the world. Global climate change is a major priority for The World Bank as developing countries will be particularly vulnerable to adverse conditions caused by it.

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While looking to print a coupon for Borders, I was presented with a Drupal "database is overloaded" error message from their coupons site!

Drupal.org's use of CVS as a version control system has long been a thorn in the side of the project and its contributor community. As many newer (and sexier) version control systems have popped up over the years, most of us have switched to something else for our day-to-day work, and the only time we need to remember how to use CVS again is when we are interacting with Drupal.org. It's a pain even for the most "blue-blooded" among us, and for some, this is a blocker to contributing back altogether. Dries has even identified playing around with other version control systems in his 8 steps for Drupal 8, and Larry also identifies it as a requirement for Drupal to realize it's not an underground success anymore.

Naturally, this situation prompts the periodic raising of the (perfectly reasonable) question by someone every few weeks of, "Why the %&#! is Drupal still using CVS?!" At one point, we got sick of expending time, energy, and focus on this question constantly, and so wrote up Why is Drupal still using CVS and how can I help change that?.

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I've been looking at how we can include different images in translated content. Translating the text in content is fairly straight forward but keeping track of hundreds of different images in many languages quickly becomes a serious problem.

We have had an inquiry from a client that has an online help system using Drupal. Many of the help pages include screen shots and these screen shots need to be different in each language. We're talking about thousands of images, translated into at least six languages.

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UPDATE: There is some controversy about 1), see more information here: http://drupal.org/node/475858. As pointed out by some readers, there are other ways to figure out the Drupal version of the site.

While Drupal is a secure system, there are 4 configuration issues that are often overlooked when developing a Drupal site. By following a few easy steps, we can make a Drupal site much less vulnerable.

1) Leaving Drupal Version Information Text Files on Server
A lot of developers forget to delete the Change Log and other text files that come with the Drupal package. By leaving the text files on the server and having them accessible, you enable potential hackers to know about the exact version of Drupal that you are using. Once the hackers know about the version, they can more easily find the exploits to hack into the Drupal site.

2) Cross Site Scripting

Yea I just submitted my Drupalcon San Franciso 2010 session now I have to wait to see if it's worthy of a talk fingers crossed

Here are the details and the Drupal Con session submission link just in case you where wanting to vote for it on Feb 16th, 2010:

Filmmaker John Waters began his career as an "underground success", making films that mainstream wouldn't touch because they were too controversial, raunchy, or just plain weird. After several underground successes, however, he started to get noticed outside of underground and indie circles and move into the mainstream, where he had even more commercial success.

Many of his fans derided him for the move, claiming he was "caving into the man" or betraying his underground roots by adapting his style for wider audiences. In an interview for his 1998 film Pecker, Waters made the comment (sadly I do not have the direct quote handy) that the problem with being an underground success is that you then, by definition, cannot stay underground. And yes, that means you sometimes have to change things.

Why do I bring this up? Because Drupal has long since ceased being an underground success and is now a major mainstream open source player... and it's time that the community acted like it.