[drupal-docs] Drupal Drops Newsletter - May 23, 2005 - Draft

Thu May 19 10:34:39 UTC 2005

This is a "next-to-final" draft. Here is what remains to be done:
1) Retitle the sections, the current titles are a little bland and don't 
realy match the subjects.
2) Add URL's to chx's Drupal Quickies column (I think he's working on this 
himself, chx?)
3) Add a "Cool Tips/Tricks" section, should content be available.

Robin

-.-.-

Drupal Drops - English Edition
Issue #1 - May 20, 2005
___________________________________

Welcome to the first ever Drupal Drops Newsletter! Drupal Drops will provide 
monthly information, news and advocacy for, hopefully, everyone's favourite 
CMS.

The best part, you help write it! We get all our content from forum posts, 
changlelogs and monthly contributors. This means that we are a completely 
community-powered newsletter. 

If you want to contribute to Drupal Drops, you can send information to 
devlinks at gmail.com and, if it looks good, it will be included in the next 
edition of Drupal Drops.

Over the last month Drupal 4.6 was released. You'll find some of the latest 
updates from Drupal 4.6 to CVS in this month's Updates section.

All of us sincerely hope you'll enjoy Drupal Drops!

Robin Monks
Drupal Drops Editor

___________________________________

1) Drupal Sightings
___________________________________

Rasmus Lerdorf_____________________
There is now no doubt that Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) knows about 
Drupal. Thanks to the quick thought and camera skills of Gordon Heydon, this 
(http:// buytaert.net/albums/miscellaneous-2005/11/<http://buytaert.net/albums/miscellaneous-2005/11/>)
photo was snapped at the Australia national Linux conference in April with 
Rasmus and Drupalicon. Great work Gordon!

Yahoo!_____________________________
A recent article at http://boxesandarrows.com tells of how, after 
considering many options (Movable Type, pMachine, PHPNuke, PHPCollab, 
Tikiwiki and Drupal) and user interface patterns, Yahoo! choose Drupal for 
it's internal site. 
"Ultimately, we chose Drupal because of its breadth of capabilities, 
powerful taxonomy, and extensibility"
The original article can be found at 
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/implementing_a_pattern_library_in_the_real_world_a_yahoo_case_study.phpand
the
drupal.org <http://drupal.org> write-up at http://drupal.org/node/21930.

Dan Gillmor/Bayosphere_____________
Dan Gillmor (a prominent journalist; http://www.dangillmor.com/) has 
recently started a grass-roots program (http://bayosphere.com/node/28) that 
is happily based on Drupal. An article on why they choose Drupal can be 
found at http://bayosphere.com/why-drupal, and the
Drupal.org<http://Drupal.org>write up is at
http://drupal.org/node/22919.

moby.com___________________________
Moby.com <http://Moby.com> has also been found to be secretly using Drupal 
(see the node URL under the news link). The Drupal.org
<http://Drupal.org>comment is at
http://drupal.org/node/22919#comment-39354.

___________________________________

2) Drupal In The Press
___________________________________

Tangent Mobile_____________________
Tangent Mobile has recently published an article concerning the changing CMS 
systems and development of these systems. This article reviews Drupal and 
WordPress and can be found at 
http://www.tangentmobile.com/2005/05/05/blogging-content-management-systems-wordpress-drupal/
.

Slashdot___________________________
Slashdot also noted Dan Gillmor's Grassroots Journalism efforts with Drupal 
at http://slashdot.org/articles/05/05/16/1037230.shtml.

LinuxWorld: South Africa Linux firm 
upgrades corporate identity________
"Our stand will play host to thought-provoking talks from our experts on... 
technical topics like... setting up content management with Drupal; and more 
open source community-focused topics." 
http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;2032004860;fp;2;fpid;1

___________________________________

3) Updates
___________________________________

Drupal quickies, May 2005__________
This is a summary of what the developers are working since Dries has opened 
the new developer tree on Apr 7, 2005. I presume that you are familiar with 
Drupal 4.6, I'll list only the major news. This does not mean we discredit 
those who have fixed bugs, improved help texts and so on, but this 
newsletter can't include all the changes.
* The first big change is the addition of folksonomy support by Morbus Iff. 
When you are editing a node, you can enter comma separated tags. Simple and 
effective. You can enable free tagging per vocabulary. For folksonomy 
vocabularies a pager is added. It is under consideration that this pager 
should be used for "big" normal vocabularies as well.
* jeremy at kerneltrap.org introduced loose caching. For highly dynamic sites 
the existing cache mechanism is not performing well. Loose caching keeps 
caching pages except for specific users who have submitted changes to the 
site. This means the cache can be used for a couple minutes more, while 
users still see their own changes reflected immediately. It seems that there 
are issues and we need locking to make this perfect.
* Nedjo added an author information block.
* Steven improved the auto-linebreak filter to ignore the contents of 
<script> and <style> This makes it easier to use JavaScript (e.g. Google 
AdSense) blocks. For 4.6 as well
* Dries and chx added a site-wide contact form (as seen on 
http://drupal.org/contact) to contact module.
* Jose A Reyero reworked the 'request new password' functionality. Drupal 
now sends a one-time usable URL which lets you log in and change the 
password.
* The queue module has been moved into contrib.
* chx has centralized print theme page calls. This lets you put the output 
of any Drupal call into a block. Several pages turned out to be totally 
empty after this, but it seems fixed by now.
* Stefan and TDobes has made status messages and help themeable.
* chx has changed the block configure page based on ideas from Dries. Now 
you can use PHP code to define pages where a block is visible. Node type 
constraint is gone.
* Dries optimized "Who's online" block and corrected the "Last access" 
column
in the user administration overview table. You can now sort users by 'last
access'.
* chx fixed a long outstanding bug regarding duplicate inserts. However, 
this
made PHP 4.3 required for Drupal if mysql is used. Also, this bugfix led to
some code cleanup and speedup in search module by mathias.
* mathias and mikeryan improved performance of path aliases.
* James and Gerhard made file downloads more robust. Now it's harder for
contrib modules handling file downloads to create a security hole.
* Last but not least, XTemplate engine has been moved to contrib and now 
PHPTemplate is the default. All hail Adrian for PHPtemplate. Gordon ported 
Bluemarine and has written a port guide.

Stay tuned for more improvements:
* Blocks everywhere on the page, not just left and right.
* Installation system.
* Revisions moved to a separate table. Speaking of revisions, check Moshe 
Weitzman's diff module in contrib, it's really nice.
* Grants based on taxonomy. And an UI to the grant system.
* CCK.
... and lot more to come!

Karoly Negyesi,
http://drupal4hu.com/

Drupal.org <http://Drupal.org> Downloads_______________
Steven has recently updated the Drupal.org <http://Drupal.org> downloads 
page with a new, better, easier to use interface. You can see his handiwork 
at http://drupal.org/project.

___________________________________

4) Drupal News
___________________________________

Reverse Bounties___________________
The recent experiment concerning reverse bounties (
http://drupal.org/node/20301) on Drupal.org <http://Drupal.org> is an 
apparent success; securesite (http://drupal.org/project/securesite) was 
completed last month (April 25) by Karoly Negyesi. This experiment is also 
being duplicated with a portfolio module (http://drupal.org/node/21574).
This site, http://www.webs4.com/quiz_module, sums up the idea nicely: 
"It is often said that open source software is all about scratching one's 
own itch...We have also noticed that many itches go unscratched...One 
recourse would be to hire other programmers to produce the desired software. 
Get some help with all the scratching. Few programmers, however, have the 
resources to hire others to do programming for them...But what if more than 
one person has the same itch? The great thing about software is that, at 
least in theory, a problem can be solved once and the solution shared 
infinite times. So if all of the people who are interested in solving a 
certain problem could just get together and pitch in their spare change, 
might they not be able to hire that programmer after all?"

Drupal Documentation_______________
The new Drupal Documentation project (found at 
http://lists.drupal.org/listinfo/drupal-docs) is now underway. Users and 
developers are encouraged to contribute and give suggestions to the future 
of Drupal documentation resources.

___________________________________

5) Drupal Talk
___________________________________

Interview: Károly Négyesi__________
This month, I'll be interviewing Károly Négyesi (a Drupal core contributor). 
Hopefully we'll be interview various contributors over the next issues. Now, 
on with the interview!

Robin Monks: How did you first start working with Internet CMSs?

Károly Négyesi: A friend of mine and I was building a few small web sites in 
the years 2002-2004 but we reached a point where it was too cumbersome and 
slow to build everything from ground up each time. So, we were searching for 
a CMS and we were pretty desperate. Every system we found was bloated and 
hard to expand. 
Then, on May 29, 2004 another friend of mine had toted me to the Hungarian 
PHP conference. Goba spoke about Drupal. I was stunned. I sent my partner an 
SMS during the speech "we have our CMS".

Robin: So, what were your first thoughts about Drupal?

Károly: "I was looking for this since January!" Really, this was my first 
thought

Robin: So, an intense feeling of heart-felt excitement?

Károly: Yes. It felt right just by looking at the presentation.

Robin: So, how long before you started actually using Drupal?

Károly: After that talk? Immediately. When I got home that evening.

Robin: How long did it take you to set up Drupal as your CMS?

Károly: Well, the basic setup was always very simple, I do not remember the 
exact time but it was never more than say, 15 minutes.

Robin: OK, and how long before you actually started deploying Drupal?

Károly: Well, that was a long process I immediately begin working on a 
client's website, which took more than a month, and the result was horrible. 
I needed to completely rewrite it for 4.5.

Robin: Approximate how long before you, say, contributed to Drupal itself?

Károly: My first core patch?

Robin: Yes, or contributed module.

Károly: ChangeSet 3751 Â· 2004/09/15 09:54:32 GMT Â· dries k77 +6 -1 
- Made it possible for the i18n module to hook in. 
includes/common.inc 1.389 +6 -1
that was it
I needed i18n for said client... classical example of "scratch your own 
itch"

Robin: OK. So, in all, how have you found the Drupal community?

Károly: The community... hmm, that was another slow process, I began to 
comment here and there on drupal.org <http://drupal.org> and we started 
drupal.hu <http://drupal.hu> also in the fall of 2004. But close relations 
did not happen... well, until DrupalCon, I guess. This, 
http://drupal.org/node/14731, was also an important step.

Robin: OK, so, what would you tell someone who wasn't using Drupal now?

Hmm... It is very easy to set up a Web 2.0 website with Drupal. Even not so 
basic sites are easy to build because of the plethora of contrib modules.

Robin: Any final comments for our readers?

Károly: Try Drupal! Experiment freely and you'll be surprised how far you 
can get.
Robin: OK, great interview! Thanks for your time!
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