[drupal-docs] Drupal Newsletter #3 - Draft 1
Robin Monks
devlinks at gmail.com
Mon Jul 18 11:56:25 UTC 2005
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JULY, 2005 DRUPAL NEWSLETTER
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Welcome once again to the Drupal Newsletter! You'll be happy to
know we haven't had to cut back for the summer (although the heat has
made us slightly slower ;-) ).
The big news this month is out large scale outage lasting over 3
days which caused a severe disruption in the Drupal services
<http://drupal.org/node/26545>. We are happy to say we are back on
track now, and with even more Services on the horizon!
It appears our downtime was a blessing in disguise; raising over
$10,000 USD, setting up a long term hosting plan with OSL
<http://drupal.org/node/26707> and getting server and service
donations!
All of us at Drupal want to give our heart-felt thanks
<http://drupal.org/node/26602> to those in the community who took it
upon themselves to donate. Your donations will keep Drupal happily
hosted for the foreseeable future.
Of course, Drupal has had lots of smaller announcements this month,
including a restyled handbook <http://drupal.org/node/26423>, a
wedding announcement <http://drupal.org/node/25943>, a security
release <http://drupal.org/drupal-4.6.2> and a Drupal UK meetup
<http://drupal.org/meeting-uk-2005>.
In all the summer rush, don't forget to contribute to the Drupal
Newsletter! <http://drupal.org/newsletter> Your contributions keep the
Drupal Newsletter fresh and exciting, all year long!
There's a lot to catch up on this month, and it all starts...right now.
Robin Monks,
Editor
In this issue...
Upcoming Events – Find out what events are coming up for Drupal lovers.
Drupal Interview – This month's interview with Gerhard Killesreiter (killes).
Drupal Development Quickies – What have the developers thought up this month?
Server Infrastructure – Get an inside viewpoint on the upcoming Server upgrades.
Drupal Tips – How to make Drupal do things you didn't think it could.
Drupal Sightings – Let's find out new adopters to the joys of Drupal!
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UPCOMING EVENTS
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OSCON Portland August 1-5, 2005
Join us at OSCON 2005 to learn about Drupal. For those who are not
going to attend OSCON itself, we are organizing a free, offsite Drupal
conference at Portland State University which we are calling Portland
2005 Drupal Conference aka "Mini Drupal Con". Mini Drupal Con will be
in 2 parts. Part 1 (informational, for users and newbies) on Tuesday
August 2 and Part 2 on Saturday August 6th (for technical people and
coders).
When: August 1 to August 8, 2005.
Where: Portland, Oregon, USA.
More information at <http://drupal.org/conference-portland-2005>.
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DRUPAL INTERVIEW
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This month I'll be interviewing a rather well known Drupal developer,
Gerhard Killesreiter (more often known as killes). You can view his
advertisement page on Drupal.org at
<http://drupal.org/services/gerhard>.
Robin: What do you feel will be coming up for users in Drupal 4.7?
Gerhard: Well, you know as well about the goodies in cvs as well as me.
I hope that my revision system will finally make it. Also the
form rewrite is important.
RM: How do you feel about having JavaScript in the Drupal core?
GK: Not too bad. I am known as a anti-JS zealot, but I was actually
the first of the core developers to have a module with JS. ;) So, as
long as it degrades gracefully I am ok with it.
RM: So, you mentioned a revision system, could you share some more
about this for our readers?
GK: Well, it will bore the readers to death. ;)
There won't be much visible change from the outside.
The problem is that currently the revisions are stored in a
serialized field. That is a) programmatically not very clean and b)
if you have many revisions it will break.
RM: Ok, so how will the help administrators and developers?
GK: Admins will have the benefit that I also added the "log" field,
which is currently reserved for book nodes, to the node table, making
it generally available. Also, the logs are stored alongside the
revision they belong to allowing for better workflow. Etc.
RM: Nice :) So, what are your expectations for 4.7?
GK: Expectations, don't know. I certainly hope that we can release it
rather sooner than later. We are currently down to two releases per
year, I want four. Not all if those would be as feature-laden, but
that would be ok.
RM: Where do you think the Drupal developer community is going in the future?
GK: I really don't know what we will do; there are so many ideas (and
so little time).
RM: So where is the most development time being spent?
GK: Testing and bug hunting, unfortunately.
People often think that programming is about adding features, but
this is not true. More often than not you happily program along and
then suddenly you find something which looks odd and you want to fix
it, and all of a sudden half a day is gone.
RM: OK, so most time is going to Quality Assurance then.
GK: Well, QA is a bit more than just testing; at least I think it is.
Most people don't really do QA; there is simply no time, or no
interest.
RM: So, do you feel that the development is slowing down on Drupal?
Or are there still some big features in the works?
GK: No, development cannot possibly slow down Drupal.
Adrian is working on the form rewrite (which is really important).
The reason why it is important is that in fact both of the security
releases we had to do were related to the forms we build. The XML-RPC
thing was just a third party module we did not look too much at, but
the form stuff was our own code.
So, this irks me quite more than the XML-RPC thing.
RM: I see. How will SoC fit in with new feature development and bug fixes?
GK: Well, the SoC work is mostly contributed modules, so it isn't
really relevant for core, and I suspect there won't be many bug fixes
for core coming from it. But otherwise I expect to see some very nice
developments coming from it. We all had wanted a ToDo.module or a
webDAV.module.
I think it is pretty exciting that the Drupal project will receive
this enormous 55000 USD donation. Most of the money of course goes to
the students, but the code will be available for Drupal.
RM: OK, you have personally been involved with CivicSpace coding
lately, how do you see CS impacting Drupal in the coming months?
GK: I haven't been involved too much with CS before, so it is a bit
difficult to see what will happen, but I think it is a good thing that
all their developers have moved development to Drupal.org. United we
will rule! ;)
RM: OK, any last words for our readers?
GK: Hmm. Maybe every reader could fix a bug? That would be great. :)
http://drupal.org/project/issues?projects=3060&states=1&categories=bug
Plenty of bugs, free choice.
RM: OK :) Thanks for you time! Keep on coding!
GK: Yeps. :)
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DRUPAL DEVELOPMENT QUICKIES
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This month the quickies are shorter than usual, it is summer after all
and we had a very long outage and alas security problems to tackle.
Thox renamed 'light' and 'dark' to 'odd' and 'even' in drupal.css.
Check your style sheets. http://drupal.org/node/25067
Thox continues to shower us with cool JS features, this time he
introduced collapsible form groups. http://drupal.org/node/16204
chx has changed the way Drupal is initialized. It's much easier now to
write supplemental scripts or using parts of Drupal in another app
just because you like some part of API. http://drupal.org/node/18213
Ber moved user and node settings under -- surprise! -- Settings.
chx replaced the old XML-RPC library with a smaller/better/working one.
http://drupal.org/node/26391
As usual, small bugfixes and enhancements are in.
Thanks for OSU OSL, the donators and Sun Microsystems for providing
Drupal with a new home (I am pretty sure this will be repeated
elsewhere in the newsletter, but hey, you deserve it!)
Karoly Negyesi,
http://drupal4hu.com/
----------THE DRUPAL THEME GARDEN------------
A showcase of beautiful Drupal themes.
http://themes.drupal.org/
---------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------
SERVER INFRASTRUCTURE GOING FORWARD
-----------------------------------
Currently Drupal.org is hosted on a single server that shares space
with 23 sites. Due to the phenomenal response from the community,
enough funds were raised to purchase more than one replacement server.
Sun also stepped up and provided a free Sun Fire V20z server.
Discussions with Open Source Labs and Firebright have resulted in a
core architecture that will provide for a solid foundation going
forward. Three Dell PowerEdge 1850 servers are being purchased to
supplement the Sun Fire V20z.
The architecture that will be implemented for now will have the Sun
Fire V20z server dedicated to hosting the database. Two of the Dell
1850's will act as front end application servers sharing the load with
round robin DNS. The third Dell will host CVS (future SVN) and all
the mail services for drupal.org. Traditional industry standard daily
backups will continue, only now those backups will be to an OSL backup
server. This architecture is time tested across many OS platforms and
will get us up and going quickly.
Moving forward, the next step is look into implementing Linux Virtual
Server for increased availability and redundancy. This roadmap will
get a strong, reliable infrastructure in place quickly and establishes
a next step in the path moving forward.
See <http://drupal.org/node/26707> for more details.
Contributed by,
Steven Peck
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DRUPAL TIP
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Mission Statement
Is your site or community not growing as fast as you'd like? Perhaps
first-time visitors are having a hard-time figuring out what your site
is about. Why not catch your visitors' attention with a short and
clear mission statement? Go to administer -> settings to enter a
mission statement, then go to 'administer -> themes -> configure' and
make sure its display is toggled on.
Contributed by,
Steven Wittens
You can get more tips from Bryght's "Best Practices" section at
<http://support.bryght.com/taxonomy/term/8>.
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DRUPAL SIGHTINGS
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Each passing month finds us with more great Drupal powered websites to
share with you, and this month, we'd like to point out some of these
sites for you enjoyment.
Gwenview <http://gwenview.sourceforge.net/>
Gwenview is "a fast and easy to use image viewer for KDE". They use
Drupal nicely for the main site and to provide powerful features to
their users.
Mr PHP <http://mrphp.com.au/>
Mr PHP has used Drupal to power its open source and commercial
services and forums. As a bonus, they've created a non-standard home
layout.
Threadwatch <http://www.threadwatch.org/>
Threadwatch is "a community website focused on Internet marketing and
related technologies". They have used Drupal to create a rich
Slashdot style blogging site.
Drupal Powered Lives
Of course, we'd like to see more Drupal sightings, so why not be one
yourself? That what this Cafepress site wants to happen, so why not
give in to a shirt (or coat, or mug...)
<http://www.cafepress.com/drupalpowered>
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