May 2006 - Development - lists.drupal.org

Hello world - http://groups.drupal.org
by Moshe Weitzman 06 May '06

06 May '06

INTRODUCTION We've been quietly working on an exciting initiative for Drupal fans everywhere. Today we are launching a new drupal.org web site - http://groups.drupal.org. This site is for geographic groups like Vancouver and working groups like Views developers. The site provides each group with their own mini-site, where subscribers can post messages and collect replies. LOGGING IN You are welcome to login using your drupal.org username and password. Remember to append @drupal.org to the username. Note that your email address will *not* be copied over, so you'll want to edit your profile after you log in. STAYING IN TOUCH - NOTIFICATIONS There are three useful tracker pages offered by the site. See the tabs at http://groups.drupal.org/tracker. There you may also collect links for RSS feeds for each page. Alternatively, each group offers an email subscription feature. With this, you get all nodes and comments posted to the group via email. A helpful reply link is in each email. CREATING GROUPS We welcome everyone to create groups on the site. Please adhere to the guidelines posted on the creation page. ABOUT This site showcases some pretty neat technology like Organic groups, signup.module, Casetracker, Views, Localization, and more. You can read more about it at http://groups.drupal.org/about. PROVIDING FEEDBACK The site has a simple ticketing system for reporting issues - http://groups.drupal.org/project/cases/58/all. We hope to soon provide each group with its own ticketing area. We also have a feedback form - http://groups.drupal.org/contact. STATUS This site is just leaving alpha stage and entering beta. I don't anticipate a long beta like those wimpy apps Flickr and Gmail. When we leave beta, I will announce this site on drupal.org home page and in newsletters, etc. Meanwhile, feel free to blog about the site and use it heartily. It is most definitely live.

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Paving the way for CCK, intentionaly without CCK
by Gabor Hojtsy 06 May '06

06 May '06

Hi, Reading through all the development focus discussion and Dries' blog, what I see would be doable to target is an incremental process to pave the way for CCK, preparing for a possible 4.8 without CCK, but with the basic offering it would bring us. Dries outlines some needs for CCK like install profiles, dependency system. My simplified route proposal would not require these for 4.8, but still would offer great flexibility in how we can use the built in views of Drupal. 1. NCI (node cloning interface), for cloning node into book, forum, page, story, blog types (and any other the user desires). I imagine a simple interface at administer / settings / content types, where one can add another simple node type, provide a name and description, and that is it. This should be enough for the built in simple types, and should be forwards compatible for CCK. If CCK will not make it, this simple NCI feature could still be in place. 2. Abstract the view part of forums, book, blog, so that any node type can be added to a forum, a book or a blog equaly easily. This should be done regardless of taking the intermediary NCI setup, or going right to CCK. The point of this mail mainly is that we should go the NCI step first, and see if CCK can make it for the release. If not, the real end user advantage is still going to be there, being the possible addition of new content types (and losing the hassle of choosing between page and story for newcomers). Being able to push other types of content to blog or forum is a long awaited feature, at least one special forum module was developed for this very reason. Book allows us to add any type, but it is quite hard to add non-book node types to forums, not as easy as assigning a path alias (it should be that easy). So what do I see is that people can work on the blog/forum/book view abstraction in preparation for NCI or CCK, and we can add NCI as an intermediary feature (or a final one CCK being a contrib module extending it for the time being). This would greatly reduce bloat, and I am sure NCI would take a lot less code (and support :) then what is required now to support story, page, book, forum and blog. It would also be the most painless route to take to abstract the built in views, but still would pave the way for CCK a great amount, providing a much lower footprint solution for those not needing CCK goodness. IMHO core node types need no CCK to function. Attachments and path aliases are great node addons, polls can be retargeted as such, book outlining, forum and blog association can be retargeted as such, so what is left are only simple basic node types, which can be created with NCI. I strongly beleive that instead of taking another revenge on core with the introduction of CCK, a quick and smooth 4.8 transition would be possible with NCI, which takes one of the most important steps to pave the way for CCK, but still does not need a major overhaul of how nodes are done (it is not a heart transplant as opposed to how Dries explained CCK in his blog). Goba

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node_insert() function
by michel ziobudda morelli 06 May '06

06 May '06

Hi all. I have read into drupal's forum about the existent of this new node function. I have searched for it in drupal.org and api.drupal.org whitout results. Anyone know something about this function ??? Tnx. -- Michel 'ZioBudda' Morelli michel(a)ziobudda.net http://www.ziobudda.net ICQ: 58351764 http://www.phpbook.it FAX: 0291390660 http://www.ajaxblog.it TEL: 3939890025

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FYI: PC Pro article on Drupal
by Karthik 06 May '06

06 May '06

A pretty level-headed write-up on Drupal, albeit w.r.t. 4.6.. http://www.pcpro.co.uk/realworld/86449/meet-drupal.html -K

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Node inject
by michel ziobudda morelli 05 May '06

05 May '06

Hi all. I have my node-type in drupal and I need to store my old data (from my old CMS). I have thinked to make a scripts that load old-data and call node_save() function. Is this possible ? Any rtfm about something like this one ? How can I interface my script with drupal (e.g. db_* function) ? Tnx in advance. M. -- Michel 'ZioBudda' Morelli michel(a)ziobudda.net http://www.ziobudda.net ICQ: 58351764 http://www.phpbook.it FAX: 0291390660 http://www.ajaxblog.it TEL: 3939890025

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Forms APIing our theme system
by Nedjo Rogers 05 May '06

05 May '06

Changing the way we handle theme() calls is great, but what about the data we're passing them? Currently it's a mish-mash of various numbers of arguments, data types, etc. Here's another place the Forms API shines. We pass a well defined, structured data set. Clean separation of content and presentation. While we're making changes, we could consider a full move to a Forms API approach for all data passed to theming. Likely doing so would greatly simplify the theming system. * 'node', 'block', etc. element types * generate the whole page as a nested array data structure and then pass once to theming (Then if someone wants e.g. to use XSLT to generate a full SVG environment, easy. Serialize the data array as XML, pass to the XSL, done.)

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SoC - (general) object oriented coding
by Novák Áron 04 May '06

04 May '06

Hi, Should any piece of Drupal code (especially the newly written codes) contain objects? Should I design new modules/etc in object oriented way? I use fgrep to browse in Drupal cvs code, but I can't find any class. Is it a non-written coding standard to not use oo? (by the way in PHP4 the oo is not very mature) Thanks, Aron Novak

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4.7 maintenance: testing of the 4.7 cvs repository
by Gerhard Killesreiter 04 May '06

04 May '06

Hi there! You may have noticed that I continue to apply patches to the 4.7 branch of the repository. Most of them are smallish bugfixes which are unlikely to affect anybody. Nevertheless I would appreciate if people keep a close watch on them and report bugs as the find them. If you have a personal site of smallish importance, it would help the maintenance process if you coul drun it directly from CVS or update the 4.7 cvs tarballs regularly. There is also an issue which makes the release of a maintenance release more likely: http://drupal.org/node/61867 Any fixes that get tested before that release will can be part of it. :p Cheers, Gerhard

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WANTED: Mentors for AJAX/JS SoC projects
by Angie Byron 04 May '06

04 May '06

There have been at least a few applications submitted thusfar that are centred around AJAX and JS scripting. If you have some expertise in this area, and can spare some time over the summer to help guide students and help them out if they get in a jam, please sign up @ the http://groups.drupal.org/google-summer-of-code-2006 and view the post there about getting registered to Google as a mentor. If you're already signed up to be a mentor, please check out some of the AJAX applications and vote on them/offer to take one of them on as a mentor. Remember that we're ideally planning to offer 2 mentors per student so the more mentors we have, the better, because a) it means a better experience for the student, b) it means less of a time commitment is required by each individual mentor. So please, sign up and get involved so we can get some really cool "AJAX-y" ;) projects done for Drupal over the summer!! :) -Angie

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Drupal x.x.0 freeze date
by Neil Drumm 04 May '06

04 May '06

What does everyone think of hard feature freeze on September 1st? That gives us approximately 4 months of development time. A good time for a release after that would be one to two months later, but in reality it would be "when it is ready." That is only 4 months and I am seeing a lot of ways we want to break everything; this will probably be 4.8 and not 5.0. I don't think making roadmaps for contributions we can't control is too productive, but if we did have a roadmap, we would have a clear idea of what we can call 5.0. -- Neil Drumm http://delocalizedham.com/

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