[development] How Trellon gave back to Drupal (May 2008)

[Morbus Iff]

http://www.trellon.com/

As a well-known Drupal shop, Trellon continually strives to contribute
back to the Drupal community in any way it can. Sometimes, we're just
too busy, other times, we're just plain ol' lazy and, more often than
not, Morbus is complaining about quality or phenoptosis or whatever. By
keeping track of what we give back, however, we hope to more clearly see
how much we are, or aren't, helping Drupal help ourselves.

This month saw the release of a number of modules:

     Xapian integration
     http://drupal.org/project/xapian
     http://www.trellon.com/blog/xapian-search-drupal
     "A common challenge for Drupal sites is working with documents in
     different formats and getting them into the search engine. Drupal
     does not natively index PDFs and Word documents, despite the fact
     they are the most commonly exchanged text formats on the Internet
     (outside of HTML) ... [we've] developed a module that replaces
     Drupal's native search features with the Xapian search engine."

     Teleport 1.0
     http://drupal.org/project/teleport
     We announced this last month, but our "hotkey-activated launcher
     utility inspired by Quicksilver" has reached 1.0, for both Drupal
     5 and Drupal 6.

On a recent project, we've had to provide simple event signups and
payment acceptance. The signup module provides part of this solution,
but we also added the signup_pay and signup_status modules to the mix.
Some remaining requirements resulted in a few additional companions:

     Signup Pay Early Bird
     http://drupal.org/project/signup_pay_early_bird
     Adds two extra fields to the signup_pay module that allows the
     event creator to specify an early bird discount rate, or percentage,
     which is then taken into account by signup_pay (req. small patch).

     Signup Restrict by Role
     http://drupal.org/project/signup_restrict_by_role
     Adds the ability to restrict signups to a particular role.
     For example, if you only want users with the "members" role to
     be allowed to signup for a particular event.

     Event Webform
     http://drupal.org/project/event_webform
     Adds the ability to relate a webform to an event. This is
     particularly useful for letting users include requirements for
     the event (do they want lunch, a room, pickup at airport, etc.)

A healthy number of patches were also contributed, plus one for core:

     Drupal core: Allow new comment timestamp to be passed
     http://drupal.org/node/253577

     constant_contact: subscriptions.module integration
     http://drupal.org/node/263691

     link: Extra url parameters
     http://drupal.org/node/256490

     mailhandler: Dies if command line found with no command
     http://drupal.org/node/253906

     services: XMLRPC server does not honor optional parameters
     http://drupal.org/node/179848

     signup_pay: various typos
     http://drupal.org/node/260066
     http://drupal.org/node/260524

     signup_pay: Add new status code link doesn't show correctly
     http://drupal.org/node/260527

     signup_pay: Role weights errors
     http://drupal.org/node/260539

     signup_pay: Allow other modules to change payment amounts
     http://drupal.org/node/263575

     usernode: add user roles as a viewable field within views
     http://drupal.org/node/260780

Until next month, superfriends, Develop Drupal Daringly!

-- 
Morbus Iff ( damn you richards! i will have my revenge! )
Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779
Enjoy: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.videounderbelly.com/
aim: akaMorbus / skype: morbusiff / icq: 2927491 / jabber.org: morbus