February 2006 - Development - lists.drupal.org

Porting of 4.7 modules
by Kobus Myburgh 28 Feb '06

28 Feb '06

Hi, Is there a list of modules that are currently not maintained that needs to be maintained? I am starting to understand Drupal coding and modules a lot better now and would like to take on some of the modules without maintainers now. Can anybody point me to such a list? Or at least have an indication of how I can determine whether a module is maintained or not? Regards, Kobus

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Forms API to display tabular data
by Boris Mann 28 Feb '06

28 Feb '06

Not sure if Dan is on this list. Should be discussed if a patch is needed -- see http://drupal.org/node/51726 -- Boris Mann Vancouver 778-896-2747 San Francisco 415-367-3595 SKYPE borismann http://www.bryght.com

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What would be more useful for install/etc
by Neil Drumm 28 Feb '06

28 Feb '06

As much as everyone loves speculating about potential directory structures and file formats, theres other stuff to do. -Error avoidance. Module install and updates will happily go ahead and try to do things which are access denied and then think they are done. We need to check for access before doing these. One for each combinataion of alter/create and mysql/postgres to get started. -Error handling. Output to AJAX (as used in update.php, among other places) should never return HTML errors to the client; or the JS could be more forgiving. Either we need to work with PHP's error handling (I've just about given up on this due to PHP's lack of sanity) or make JS able to handle the PHP error spew. -- Neil Drumm http://delocalizedham.com/

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Re: enterprise needs
by Ken Rickard 28 Feb '06

28 Feb '06

Just some thoughts based on the discussion so far, from the perpective of a large enterprise that is evaluating our future use of Drupal. For perspective, we run about 10 million page views per month across 30+ sites. - 4,6 v. 4.7. We use what is appropriate at the time our projects start, with an eye towards maintaining an upgraded path. In one case, that means we're running a security patched 4.5. In another, 4.6.5 (which is our current standard). While I was at OSCMS, I heard good, passionate reasons for upgrading to 4.7, but I can't justify it for two reasons: 1) It's still in 'beta' and I don't have the resources to help move it out of beta (more on that below); 2) We 'froze' our selection of contributed modules on November 15, 2005 for this project. The module compatibility issue would be largge if we moved to 4.7. - Drupal already _is_ ready for enterprise use: it just depends on your enterprise. Bryght, OurMedia, and NowPublic all come to mind as 'enterprise' Drupal companies. The issue (at least in my experience) is that those three are all 'new' ventures that used Drupal as the basline of their IT infrastructure. Integrating Drupal into an existing IT structure (including all the 'policies and procedures' that you currently have in place) can be quite daunting. - Commit to Drupal or not? This depends on the fundamental question: "How much time does Drupal save you versus 1) creating your own CMS; 2) using some other OSS or commercial CMS? This one, I think is a no-brainer, with one caveat, which is: - Commit to Drupal.org. After spending the week in Vancouver, I made the following report to our management team. If we are to go forward using Drupal, we need a dedicated support-and-development team of 3 people. (And my eyeball prediictions of such things are ususally pretty accurate.) The team lead will have, as one of his/her main responsibilities, the task of being our public face within the Drupal community. This includes going to events, encouraging contributions of code, and helping with documentation. This is crucial, because without being a valued member of the community, all you'll ever really have is your own Drupal fork to support. If your organization goes forward with the idea of contributing patches to core, helping document Drupal, and so forth, then you will have a voice in future Drupal development. /climbs off soapbox. All that said, we still haven't committed to Drupal long-term because for us there is big issue that hasn't been fully solved: Drupal scalability. I'm pretty confident that Drupal scales, but optimizing servers for Drupal is still a pretty rare skill. (And, yes, we are diving into the forums on the topic.) And, wouldn't you know, solving the scalability problem conflicts with our current IT culture.

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flickr - how to scale a php app
by Moshe Weitzman 28 Feb '06

28 Feb '06

with all the enterprise talk floating about, i want to share this persentation from the flickr guys which circulated for a while but i bet some folks haven't seen it. there is some good info on their scaling problems and solutions. no deep details, but still useful. their usage stats are impressive, and i'm sure they have grown tremendously since this presentation. see http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/uploads/flickr_php.pdf

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IMPORTANT: 2 new core committers
by Dries Buytaert 27 Feb '06

27 Feb '06

Hello world, I'm happy to announce that as of today, there will be two new core committers: 1. Gerhard Killesreiter (killes) 2. Neil Drumm (drumm) This brings the number of core committers to four: Gerhard Killesreiter (killes), Neil Drumm (drumm), Steven Wittens (steven) and myself. Gerhard and Neil will operate under different terms than Steven and myself. Details at http://drupal.org/node/51536. -- Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/

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Busy for the next couple of months...
by Benson Wong 27 Feb '06

27 Feb '06

Hi, Over the past week I really stuck my nose in a bunch of Drupal dev stuff, now I got some performance writing work for the handbook to do, and probably some involvement in the i18n stuff. I'm looking forward to doing as much as I can to help the project out in these areas. On that note, I also have this _huge_ project, as in I have to build an i18n web site for my company that will probably have about 50,000 pages, servicing 8000 associates across Canada in the next few months. This is my main priority, but I'll contribute as much as I can to the efforts above. I have to make the tough decision of choosing to stay with Drupal (with already a few months of development invested), or switch to another CMS that supports multi-lingual content. I just wanted to post this because with my recenty frenzy of posts, it may seem like I was ready to step up to the plate and hunker down for some hard core, all night drupal development. I would really like to contribute at that level, but my first priority is the project above (pays the bills and all ya-know). :) Out of respect, I wanted to make sure there wasn't any false expectations. Thanks. Ben.

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Re: [development] Re: enterprise needs
by Benson Wong 27 Feb '06

27 Feb '06

I have one of these, a 5.6TB one... http://www.flickr.com/photos/benzo/sets/162916/ It was a pain getting it to work with FreeBSD 5.4 :) ... What do you mean by RAM front end? Ben.

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How to Log in a user
by stuff＠trackingsolutions.ca 27 Feb '06

27 Feb '06

Hello, I am hacking the user.module to integrate better with my hacked version of the ecommerce module :). I would like to automatically redirect the user after creating a new account to the next step in the shopping cart. I am having problems tracking down the code that will allow my new user to login without having to fill in a form and press the login button. I already have the user name and password. So I would like to preform the following: 1. Detect if the action came from the shopping cart. I am successfull in this by parsing drupal_get_ destination for cart/checkout. 2. I would like to automatically check the user in without their interaction. I need help with this one. 3. Automatically redirect the user to the next step in the shopping cart. I need some help with this one. Thanks for your help.

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file handling, open_basedir for 4.7?
by Darrel O'Pry 27 Feb '06

27 Feb '06

Whats the consensus on supporting open_basedir for 4.7. I have one issue open with that I'd appreciate some external testing on... http://drupal.org/node/5961 If open_basedir support is not critical for 4.7 I'll downgrade the bug. Regardless I'd like to have it working. So if you have time for patch review please poke at it.

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