[drupal-docs] Drupal Newsletter #2 -DRAFT-
Robin Monks
devlinks at gmail.com
Mon Jun 20 11:18:17 UTC 2005
Second Draft, to be released this afternoon:
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JUNE, 2005 DRUPAL NEWSLETTER
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Welcome to this month's Drupal Newsletter! Last month, Drupal.org
released Drupal 4.6.1 which fixes a couple serious security
vulnerabilities. All users are recommended to update
<http://drupal.org/project>.
Of course, the Drupal community can't always have their nose to the
grindstone. The Bryght guys proved that with their "boot camp" photos
<http://flickr.com/photos/chrys/sets/459331/>.
Also, we'd like to welcome Drupal creator Dries Buytaert back from
Chicago. He has a photo gallery of his trip here
<http://www.buytaert.net/albums/chicago-2005/9/>.
We wanted to make this month's issue the best yet, so we've made
various changes to this month's newsletter. We've got a new layout
thanks to Chris Messina (who is now working at <http://roundtwo.com> )
and many new tips and tutorials from new contributors.
We also have a new events section, where you'll be able to find all
upcoming Drupal relevant events in a glance.
As always, we're a community newsletter, so feel free to contribute
<http://drupal.org/newsletter> and make Drupal Newsletter even better!
Robin Monks
Editor
In this issue...
Upcoming Events – What events are coming up for Drupal users and developers.
Drupal Interview – This month's interview with David Carrington (thox).
Drupal Tips – How to make Drupal do things you didn't think it could.
Drupal Development Update – What's new in the world of Drupal developers.
Drupal Site Spotlight – We'll show you how Music for America uses Drupal.
Drupal Sightings – Where will the Druplicon be spotted next?
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UPCOMING EVENTS
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OSCON Portland August 1-5, 2005
OSCON <http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2005/> will be in
Portland, Oregon, USA 1-5 August 2005. We are using this as an
opportunity to bring together anyone interested in Drupal who is in
the area or already coming to OSCON. Topics include:
* Drupal Developers
* Drupal Users
* CivicSpace
* Usability meet-up
* DrupalEd meet-up
* Drupal.org infrastructure
More information at <http://drupal.org/node/24033>.
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DRUPAL INTERVIEW
----------------
This month Robin Monks will be interviewing a relatively new Drupal
developer, David Carrington (more often known as Thox). He is best
known for his work on introducing AJAX into the Drupal core
<http://drupal.org/node/22519>. His developer website is at
<http://brandedthoughts.co.uk>.
Robin: How did you first get involved with Drupal?
David: I was looking for a PHP CMS for a SourceForge project that has
now gone bust (as so many of their projects do).
Robin: So, how did you like it? (for that project)
David: I installed the i18n module straight away for one of the
Russian developers, and we were both happy with how easy the
translations were.
Robin: OK, so when did you become involved in the Drupal core?
David: I decided to look through almost every line of Drupal and strip
it down to the bare essentials, by the time I was finished - I still
had Drupal!
Robin: And why did you want to strip it down?
David: I tend to like lean and mean PHP scripts, with no bloated code
at all. But after taking out the "bloat" of Drupal, I was adding it
back in. Pretty much every function is used with a good purpose.
Robin: So, this encouraged you to become actively involved with Drupal
core code?
David: my main encouragement was when I started trying to write a
recipe module for the stripped down Drupal I had made. After a few
days of development I realised a node module would be much more
efficient. I spoke with a number of developers and got a *lot* of
positive feedback on the changes I was suggesting.
Robin: And some of these changes involved the use of AJAX?
David: Yes, one of the key features of my recipe module was being able
to use Ajax-powered auto complete on the ingredients.
Robin: Could you briefly describe how AJAX works in Drupal, for some
of our less technical readers?
David: It uses client-side JavaScript to create a new connection to
the server. You can use that connection to request more information
from the server that the JavaScript can use to create some handy
features.
Robin: And how has this impacted Drupal development?
David: It seems that the auto complete code could was quickly adopted
into the node module and the folksonomy module. Hopefully other Ajax
functions will come later to bring some new ideas - and ideally make
Drupal's interface faster, simpler, and more usable.
Robin: Nice! What are you currently working on Drupal-wise?
David: For Drupal itself, I'm working on collapsing page areas to make
the larger pages easier to use. Between that, I'm working on a module
to keep track of my Scout troop.
Robin: How do you feel Drupal will be changing over the coming months?
David: I'm hoping that the learning curve of creating complex new
features will be simpler for new developers. The planned changes to
forms and the addition of the content creation kit (CCK) should
hopefully make this easier.
Robin: Thanks for your time! Any final words for our readers?
David: If you make something new for your own site, suggest it on
drupal.org and maybe other people can use it too :)
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DRUPAL TIPS
-----------
CUSTOM CONTENT TYPES
Need more flexibility in creating content? Are the simple page and
story content types not enough for your site's needs? Do you wish you
could create content types on the fly by just filling in a few fields?
Try the Flexinode <http://drupal.org/project/flexinode> module.
Once installed, you can go to administer->content->content types and
create custom content types. For each content type, you can specify a
set of fields that can be filled out by the content contributors.
Once you set up all the fields, you can easily add content by
selecting the new content type from the create content menu.
WYSIWIG EDITORS
Writing rich content in Drupal is sometimes a hassle. You either
write the page in a separate WYSIWIG editor and copy it into Drupal or
code HTML in the tiny textarea.
However, it is possible to easily integrate one of the many inline
WYSIWIG editors into Drupal.
You can choose from TinyMCE <http://drupal.org/project/tinymce>,
FCKEditor <http://drupal.org/node/16118> and HTMLArea
<http://drupal.org/project/htmlarea>.
Install one of these modules and within minutes, you can create
diverse content right from your browser.
ORGANIZE YOUR CONTENT
Is your content rampaging all over the place? Organize it and make
it easy to locate. Drupal ships with a power organization module
called Taxonomy <http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/taxonomy>.
Taxonomy allows you to define sets of categories called
"vocabularies". This makes it extremely easy to organize and group
content and make your website more navigable.
QUICK SUPPORT
Feeling a little lost? Need some quick support with Drupal? Get an
IRC client and pop into #drupal-support on irc.freenode.net. Someone
could be there to help you out.
Tips from our resident shortcut-cutter,
Sthithaprajna Garapaty
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DRUPAL DEVELOPMENT
------------------
Dries added the ability to track page generation times in the
statistics module and added extended timer implementation.
http://drupal.org/cvs?commit=15989
chx fixed a long outstanding bug in cache_set. No more duplicate
inserts into cache. This happened most of the time with locale.
http://drupal.org/node/19442
mathias and mikeryan improved performance of path aliases.
http://drupal.org/node/22035
chx made it possible for module authors to rewrite taxonomy queries.
Expect private forums and such. http://drupal.org/node/16452
Thox has introduced himself to the Drupal community with an AJAX
autocompleting feature, first in a module. Very quickly it began to move
into core. Steven expanded it based on Code Sprint usability meeting
results. The feature was met with great interest from several developers
((Dries, Bèr, Tim, Moshe, ...). killes suggested using the autocomplete for
free tagging (folksonomy).
Thox removed ][ from form item id's. http://drupal.org/node/23516
Steven improved favicon handling, as an option, now they are
user-configurable and per-theme. http://drupal.org/node/20809
Thox fixed the "undefined is undefined" error in IE5 with drupal.js .
(We just love Microsoft error messages -- ed.).
http://drupal.org/node/24068
Djun made books exportable in XML format. The XML is DocBook "at the
level of structure", but node contents are wrapped as CDATA, since we
can't be sure that the contents are valid XML. This fixes a number of
bugs and fulfills a two year old request. http://drupal.org/node/1482
http://drupal.org/cvs?commit=16566
Moshe made it possible to ban visitors based on hostname/IP. Banning
visitors can either be done from the 'access control' pages, or
directly from the statistics pages. http://drupal.org/node/24135
More book module enhancements from Djun: OPML export functionality,
better code comments, better help texts, etc. Apparently this guy
loves settling two year old issues. http://drupal.org/node/1898
Robin Monks is cleaning the Aegean Stables of stale Drupal bugs, ie.
those that were reported several months, sometimes a year ago. Most of
these are fixed by now, just the issues are not closed. Soon this work
will be over and the developers can concentrate only on those that
really need fixing. If you are using HEAD, help Robin by trying to
reproduce bugs.
Also, we are now a mentoring organization at Google's Summer of Code
thanks to Robert Douglass.
Also, there were a tremendous lot of bug fixes, help and status
message enhancements and themability improvements.
Karoly Negyesi,
http://drupal4hu.com/
----------THE DRUPAL THEME GARDEN------------
A showcase of beautiful Drupal themes.
http://themes.drupal.org/
---------------------------------------------
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DRUPAL SITE SPOTLIGHT
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Music for America <http://www.musicforamerica.org/> is a national
non-profit that exists at the intersection of culture and politics.
Through a volunteer presence at live concerts they build their
membership, advocate for progressive issues, and motivate young music
communities to get involved.
In 2004 they organized 2/3 of all political concerts in the US.
You'll see them on The Warped Tour this summer and at shows in half a
dozen cities every night. MFA uses CivicSpace, a distribution of
Drupal, technology to manage their complex volunteer operation and
events calendar, as well as offer a library of hundreds of songs,
hundreds more photos, daily headlines, video, and of course busy blogs
and forums. They receive 4-5000 visits each day.
Josh Koenig is a co-creator of MFA's theme and is the maintainer of
the volunteer module. Music for America has used the volunteer module
to recruit 3500 volunteers to appear at over 3000 concerts.
Music for America is also using the new event module to keep track
of hundreds of upcoming shows. The event module provides a powerful
interface which allowed MFA's developer Josh Koenig to integrate
volunteering with events so that users could click on a volunteer
button beside each event.
Volunteer manager Lisa Guthrie is looking forward to the new
location module which allows her to search for volunteers by zipcode
when new shows are added to the Music for America roster. All these
modules are currently available in the Drupal contributions
<http://drupal.org/project/Modules>.
Contributed by CivicSpace Labs,
http://civicspacelabs.org/
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DRUPAL SIGHTINGS
----------------
http://www.macavitys.co.uk/
Macavity's is a UK based independent bookseller specializing in
crime fiction, true crime and crime reference. They are using Drupal
to make their business a dynamic marketplace.
"The Flexinode module was invaluable to get us up and running
quickly although at some point I'd like to learn how to write a custom
module specific to our needs.
We are using only the basics of Drupal, but this still allowed us to
create and manage a huge amount of content. There are so many more
features of Drupal that we've not had chance to try yet and can't wait to
implement the community features."
Portland's Mayor & Drupal
Adrian Russell-Falla tells us of Potter's campaign was run with
Drupal and the Dean for America project. Over 65% of funding came
from PR Drupal sites. Way to go!
Full story: http://drupal.org/node/24033#comment-43279
http://worldusabilityday.net/
The World Usability Day website, not yet launched, is a marvellous
use of Drupal/CivicSpace for viral marketing.
http://newsphoto.nl
The world's first permanent exhibition of photographs related to the
current news. Sometimes the pictures show events that took place less
than an hour before or on the other side of the globe. Depending on
topical matters the subject will be changed every two or three weeks.
Newsphoto.nl uses Drupal, because the office needed workflows
(workflow module, action module) and because of its great abilities
for a community website.
News Photo has its own Web Cinema where you can see short films from
the internet, always related to current news affairs or the subject of
the exhibition. These films will often be gathered from sources
outside of the regular circuit.
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