Planet Drupal

Drupalcon SF 2010: DrupalCon Mobile Site is Live

Hello everyone, if your wireless drops or if you do not have a laptop just use your smart phone. The mobile site has a useful interface to view the schedule by day and by track.

I am hosting a BOF in room 206 at 4:15pm today, Monday to present how we created the mobile version of the DrupalCon website. The mobile version will automatically load for all webkit based smart phones.

Categories: Dev Feeds

Acquia: Acquia Search release features

We have marked the one year anniversary of the our hosted search service by rolling out a significant update with new features and some fixes. This was released Wednesday night (June 30).

Changes for all subscribers:

To index file attachments, you need to be able to use an application that will extract the text. Acquia Search can now provide remote text extraction for the Apache Solr Attachments module. This means that any site using Acquia Search can index attachments - even on shared hosting or with no ability to run Java applications. If you plan to use this feature, make sure you update to the most recent (currently 6.x-1.0-beta2) version of Apache Solr Attachments. If you already have Tika set up for attachment extraction, there is no reason to change.

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Categories: Dev Feeds

Ronald Ashri: The Drupal Learning Curve - Myth or Reality?

Does Drupal really have a steep learning curve? If you read the usual CMS comparison posts around the web that seems to be the general consensus. But I don't believe that is entirely fair and, as most things, it is all about relativity - how steep the mountain is depends on what is at the top of the mountain once you get there.

Most discussions regarding the relative merits of various content management systems end up presenting Drupal as a potentially powerful system but with a steep learning curve. People blame the weird terminology Drupal uses and a user interface that is not immediately intuitive. Terms like nodes and taxonomy don't directly relate to actual things likes pages and categories and once you install it is not clear what you are supposed to do next.

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Categories: Dev Feeds

CMS Quick Start: Pages, Menus, and Blocks in Drupal7

In this video we take a look at creating a few pages and creating Menu-Links, formerly Menu-Items, and then nesting those Menu-Links. We also explore the 2 different ways of viewing the Main-Menu, formerly Primary-Links. 

It's rather amazing how much has changed in Drupal7. If you're familiar with Drupal6 then you'll quickly notice that more features have been added You may even notice that there are a great many smallish contrib modules that have grown wings and flown over to Drupal7 core. In some cases they have added functionality that is tightly woven into Drupal core.

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Categories: Dev Feeds

Fusion Drupal Themes: Sample the power with your very own Fusion PowerSite

It’s time to let the whole Drupal-verse and beyond know about our Fusion PowerSites via our partners at WebEnabled. Wait, what is that again?

A Fusion PowerSite is your own hosted, fully configured development environment with sample content, modules, and a web-based interface for Drupal upgrades and module installation. In other words, it is a demo site that is a replica or “clone” of the live theme demos you see on our site. 

Clone? You mean like sheep or identical twins?

Yes! Your PowerSite is an exact, workable copy with “identical DNA” of the demo site for the theme you purchased. You may choose to use it as a model from which to build your own site from scratch. Or, you can deploy the PowerSite and use it locally or with any web host.

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Categories: Dev Feeds

Lullabot: Drupal Voices 125: Morten Heide on the Mothership Theme

Morten Heide (aka mortendk) talks about the Mothership theme, which is his solution to the Designers vs. Developers debates about clean HTML markup vs. the flexibility from the machine-generated markup.

Morten is also helping coordinate DrupalCon Copenhagen taking place August 23-27th.

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Categories: Dev Feeds

Development Seed: Opening Up Data on International Public Health: Center for Health Market Innovations

Mapping the global public health marketplace

Results for Development just launched the Center for Health Market Innovations (CHMI), a project that opens up data on and maps public health projects happening around the world. This portal represents an important open data advance for the global public health community. The site currently profiles hundreds of private sector health programs and allows practitioners and researchers to filter, map, export, and even add to the data to produce better analytical research in the global public health sector. It also has a "pipeline" feature that encourages colleagues in the field to add data on projects that aren't currently profiled, in one of the project's efforts to expand its coverage.

CHMI has an ambitious goal: to improve the capacity of global public health professionals to analyze the success of various approaches to delivering health care to the poor.

Categories: Dev Feeds

Dries Buytaert: N-VA using Drupal

The New Flemish Alliance (Dutch: Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie, abbreviated as N-VA) is using Drupal for their website: http://www.n-va.be. The N-VA is a Flemish political party. They became the largest party in both Flanders and Belgium in the 2010 federal elections a few weeks ago.

Categories: Dev Feeds

I Can Localize: Translation Management is Alive!

After months of intense development work, we're ready with the first release of Translation Management.

Until I can write a complete guide, here is a quick-starter.

In this tutorial I'll cover:

1. Downloading and installing the module
2. Making sure that multilingual workflow is enabled
3. Setting up translators
4. Sending jobs for translation
5. Translating
6. Summary

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Categories: Dev Feeds

Krimson: Cultural events via Drupal : CC Schoten

It's a tradition in the culturual field: by the end of June the program for the upcoming cultural season is presented by each theatre, cultural centre, opera in the country. At CC Schoten they picked this date as the ideal opportunity to launch their new website. From now on everybody can check out all events happening at CC Schoten via www.ccschoten.be.

Design

Categories: Dev Feeds

Krimson: Pushing the envelope with Display Suite

If you've done the odd Drupal job, you're probably familiar with Drupal's build modes. A build mode defines the way Drupal builds and presents a node to the user. Drupal core comes with a few default build modes such as 'Teaser' and 'Full node'. If you want to step sideways and - depending on the context - need extra display variants for a node (in blocks, in views, full pages,...) you'll probably end up falling back on Drupal's template suggestions. But even when you're careful, it's an easy road to perdition, clogging your theme with more template files (Views templating anyone?).

Categories: Dev Feeds

Commerce Guys: From DrupalCamp Colorado to the Drupal Commerce Sprint

We had a great time last weekend in Denver for DrupalCamp Colorado 2010. Many thanks to the organizers, sponsors, presenters, and attendees who made the camp a success and a very worthwhile learning event. There's a lot of great Drupal talent in the area, and we particularly enjoyed sessions on security, Drupal 7, and scalability by Greg Knaddison, Randy Fay (and others), and Nate Haug respectively.

After trips to the mountains and (for Damien) flying across 8 timezones, a few of the Guys still had the energy to join in with presentations. Kris Vanderwater came with us to present his Contextual Administration module and pinch hit in a Panels session, Damien joined a session on baffling Drupal bugs, and Ryan presented a session covering general tips for e-commerce on Drupal and another covering all things Drupal Commerce (slides available on SlideShare).

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Categories: Dev Feeds

Lullabot: New features in Drush 3

It just keeps getting better. Seriously.

So… Drush. Are you using it yet? If not get drushing!—or whatever you call it. If you're not familiar with it, Drush is a command line interface for Drupal sites. It's the bees knees, if you ask me. You can use it to enable/disable modules, run update.php, get a SQL dump of your site, and all sorts of other magically delicious things.
The problem is, it just keeps getting better. I almost can't keep up with it! The recent release of Drush 3 includes all sorts of goodies, and every day I seem to find more and more. I'm going to take a quick look at a few of them that I'm most excited about.

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Categories: Dev Feeds

BenBuckman.net: Drupal Fix: Ajax and Secure Pages

Drupal's Secure Pages module is great for enforcing HTTPs/SSL on particular parts of a site. But it's known to have a problem with Ajax, especially (for my purposes) autocomplete fields in node forms. The solution is to toggle https:// in $base_url so it's not seen as cross-domain, and that's most easily done by putting this line in settings.php (changing mysite.com as needed):

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Categories: Dev Feeds

BenBuckman.net: Drupal extension for Firebug and Chrome

Over on the EchoDitto Labs blog, Ethan has a post about the Firebug for Drupal module and its partner Firefox or Chrome extensions. Super cool and definitely going on my list of productivity hacks for DrupalCampNYC.

Categories: Dev Feeds

Gizra.com: Views and Panels Ajaxified

If you haven't read Roger Lopez Ajax without Javascript take a 5 minutes break and do it. If you are not a developer and all this code makes you frightened then you are excused. This post will also have a little code, but take a big breath and you'll see how easy it is to Ajaxify your Panels!

1. Download this feature and the related modules
   drush dl ctools panels views
   drush en page_manager panels views_content views_ui story_list php -y
2. Add a few story nodes (title and body), or use Devel generate module to do it for you
3. Navigate to /story-list and you should see a list of the last 10 stories on the left and the body of the first story on the right
4. Click on any of the titles and notice how the body text changes, without any page load. Hooray!

Lets go over the things we did to achieve this behavior:

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Categories: Dev Feeds

Lullabot: Drupal Voices 124: Dave Cohen on Drupal for Facebook modules

Dave Cohen gives an update on the Facebook for Drupal suite modules and what has been developed over the past year since he was awarded a grant from the Knight Foundation. Cohen talks a bit about some of the Facebook connect features, Canvas pages and Facebook-specific applications that he's been developing.

For more information, be sure to check out Cohen's DrupalCon presentation "Facebook Applications, Powered by Drupal" as well as the Drupal for Facebook site.

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Categories: Dev Feeds

Aten Design Group: HTML5 in Drupal

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Categories: Dev Feeds

Joachim Noreiko: The Oxford Comma

Here's a little function I wrote today because I needed to be able to turn a list of between one and three items into a string like 'apples, oranges, and pears', 'apples and pears', or just 'stairs'.

I figured I might as well handle everything in one place, and throw in the option to have an 'or' instead of an 'and'. There may be occasions you don't want the Oxford comma, but I can't think of any.

/**

Categories: Dev Feeds

Alexis Bellido: Drupal queries and the IN SQL operator

One of the most used functions in Drupal's database abstraction layer is db_query, which allows passing an SQL string and corresponding arguments to send a query to the database. I'll give you a quick overview of how db_query works before showing you how to drupalize a query such as:

SELECT field1, field2 FROM table_name WHERE field1 IN (value1,value2,...)

<!--break-->

As many other content management systems and web development frameworks, Drupal implements a database abstraction layer that you, the developer, can use for writing code that works with different database servers. For this to work you need to follow certain rules and this starts with the way you pass queries and arguments to the db_query function.

Arguments in a db_query call need to use sprintf style specifications, placeholders such as %d for integers and %s for strings. This allows Drupal to avoid SQL injection attacks and perform other security checks.

Let's review a simple example:

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Categories: Dev Feeds