[drupal-docs] Drupal Newsletter #5 - Draft 1

Robin Monks devlinks at gmail.com
Fri Sep 30 22:42:08 UTC 2005 

Here it is, please pick it apart!

 ---------------------------------
 SEPTEMBER, 2005 DRUPAL NEWSLETTER
 ---------------------------------

Not done yet...


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 Robert Douglass.
Drupal Development Quickies – What have the developers thought up this month?
Drupal Tips – How to make Drupal do things you didn't think it could.
Underlining Einstein – See what makes this month's features site tick.
Case Study: HR Highway – Find out why HR Highway choose Drupal for their site.



 ---------------
 UPCOMING EVENTS
 ---------------

EURO-OSCON

After the very successful O'Reilly's OSCON in the USA, there will be a
Drupal conference during the Euro-OSCON in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
This event will take place from October 16 to October 20 and will be
both within the OSCON conference (paid) and separate from the OSCON
conference (free).

The goals of the mini Drupal conference will be:
* to meet up with fellow Drupal coders and users,
* promote Drupal by showing off the power of the code and the
community to the OSCON people,
* connect with other Open Source Software projects and
* ... just have a good time!
(Gaining world dominance is just something we do in-between)

No permanent agenda has been made yet, but it seems we will be
discussing three important issues that are centralized around the code
(release cycle, new features), the infrastructure (the new hardware,
the new infra team) and the community (promotion of Drupal, starting
the foundation).

You are encouraged to come to this event; we will try to organize a
cheap hotel or place to stay for the Drupal people. So even when you
are not attending the Euro-OSCON, there is a lot to do in Amsterdam
and you will meet with all your favorite Drupal coders as well. The
list of persons that will attend these meetings can be found at
<http://drupal.org/profile/conference-amsterdam-2005> . If you want to
come as well, make sure to edit your profile at
<http://drupal.org/user/>.

Bert Boerland will be coordinating this event.  If you are willing to
help him out, contact him at <http://drupal.org/user/188/contact> . If
you want to discuss broader issues, please use the conference mailing
list, <http://lists.drupal.org/listinfo/drupal-con> . Any feedback
regarding the place, the agenda or potential sponsors is greatly
appreciated. But most of all make sure to be in Amsterdam on October
16th!

LINUX WORLD EXPO

Join us at the LinuxWorldExpo in London, Olympia, October 5-6, to
learn about Drupal and meet face to face with other drupaleers. We
will be present at the .Org village alongside Mozilla Europe,
opensourcematters.org (formerly known as Mambo), Debian, Gentoo,
OpenBSD and a lot of other great projects.

More information at <http://drupal.org/conference-london-2005>.


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 ----------------
 DRUPAL INTERVIEW
 ----------------

This month Robin Monks will be interviewing Robert Douglass about his
Drupal involvement, Google Summer of Code (SoC) and his expectations. 
For more information on Robert, visit his website at
<http://www.robshouse.net> .

Robin Monks: When do you first start using Drupal?

Robert Douglass: I started using Drupal nearly two years ago. I was
searching for software to run a blog, and somebody said that the
taxonomy feature of Drupal was hot, to I tried it.  For a while I
didn't delve any deeper as I didn't even know PHP back then.
  Eventually, though, I wanted to change some things, and that's when
I looked under the hood, at the code, for the first time.  What I saw,
I liked, and I learned how to program PHP in order to be able to work
with Drupal.

Robin: When did you first actively "get involved" with the community?

Robert: I became involved in the community in the typical manner; by
needing help and support. There were certain features (like MP3
support) that I wanted, but was missing, and the task of learning PHP
and Drupal simultaneously meant I was looking for help quite often.
  The real breakthrough, however, came in Antwerp in February. That's
when I met lots of other Drupal developers for the first time. The
feeling in Antwerp was so "right" that I came home and quit my job in
order to become a full-time Drupal freelancer.

Robin: OK, you've been quite active in the community so what do you
feel was your biggest project with Drupal?

Robert: The biggest way that I have contributed so far has been the
Google Summer of Code project. When Google announced the program, they
gave the world less than a full day to respond and apply for
participation. I thought it would be a great idea to do, so I took the
initiative and applied on Drupal's behalf (with Dries' blessing). The
program was a success, and the extent to which Drupal has benefited
could not have been foreseen.

Robin: Exactly how many participants were there in SoC?

Robert: Google was gracious and awarded our project 11 stipends. The
projects were very exciting and the students involved were a dynamic
and diverse bunch. Of the 11 projects, 10 finished, and the
contributions that were made to Drupal are enormous. I think it is
important to step back and list all of the ways that we have benefited
from Google's generosity:
  1) Our participation in SoC brought a flood of new visitors to our website.
  2) Half of the students involved had never worked with Drupal
before. Google brought them to us.
  3) We have 10 new modules or significant pieces of code to be thankful for.
  4) Virtually all of the students have gone on to make major
contributions in code, support and documentation even after the
program has ended.
  5) We will be getting $5,000 from Google to promote Drupal in various ways.
  6) We have been featured in publications like The Economist and soon
on RedHerring.com; this is great publicity.

Robin: That's really a great amount of code!  Do you know if any of
the students will continue to volunteer or be contracted to continue
working on Drupal?

Robert: Indeed, that is already the case. Several students have
continued to refine their SoC work. I expect to see at least a couple
of the students in Amsterdam at the upcoming Euro-OSCon event. I also
know that Angie Byron (webchick) has been working as a Drupal
freelancer virtually full-time since SoC ended, and is even being paid
to continue work on her project, the quiz module.

Robin: Do you think Google has (or feels like the have) more "pull" on
the project now that they've donated so much money to Drupal?

Robert: Google has played the role of the benevolent benefactor
perfectly. They appear to be completely satisfied with their efforts
without feeling the need to make the results directly relevant to
their own business plans. I really get the feeling that they are
trying to foster a healthy environment for free software and massive
participation from the upcoming generation of techno-gurus.

Robin: So, what will become of the SoC money?

Robert: We have exciting things planned for the SoC money, and in fact
some of it has already been spent. If you remember, back in August we
released Drupal 4.6.3 to close another security issue involved with
the XML-RPC library. The problems were all originating with the PEAR
library that we had adapted for use with Drupal, and we decided to
switch to a different library that was smaller, cleaner, less prone to
security issues, and easier to use. Karoly Negyesi integrated the new
library in order to make the release happen, and he will get paid for
his work with money from Google. This is a great service to Drupal and
we can be thankful both to Google and to Karoly for this great code.
  The second thing that we are going to do with the money is hold a
theme competition. An official announcement will come soon, but the
basic idea is that there will be a submission period followed by
judging, and the winners will receive cash prizes. This will hopefully
put a lot of attention on Drupal theming and motivate people to get
involved in new ways.
  After that we'll have a little left over that will be used either
for financing the efforts to make a Drupal Foundation, or to sponsor
more useful code for Drupal core.

Robin: Do you expect to see any other good will offerings to Drupal
(or free software as a whole for that matter) from large corporations?

Robert: I do expect it. I feel that the future health of large
corporations is directly linked to free software, worldwide
collaboration, open standards, and the public perceptions that
accompany these ideals.

Robin: So, now that SoC is over, what do you feel will be your next
big project in the community?

Robert: The big thing for me at the moment is the book that I am
writing about Drupal. The publisher, Apress, wants to have it on the
shelves by December, which means we are in the final stages of writing
and editing. The book, "Building Online Communities With Drupal,
phpBB, and WordPress", will cover installing and configuring Drupal,
core modules, several important contributed modules, theming, and
advanced techniques such as multi-site.

Robin: What do you think will be Drupal's next big step?

Robert: I think with the upcoming release of 4.7 we will attract a
whole new wave of users and organizations that find great value in
what we are doing. We've already built up a nice reputation for the
quality of our work, but 4.7 is unlike anything out there.
  I predict that our user and developer base will grow dramatically in
the next half year, and that we will need to address some
organizational and structural bottlenecks that exist in the way that
we do things. This is an inevitable result of rapid growth, and I
predict that we'll do a good job at scaling. Our leaders are sharp
people.
  Anyone who is going to be attending the conference in Amsterdam
might want to attend the discussion that I'll be leading to address
exactly these issues. I intend to look at the way patches are
processed and brainstorm ways that we can make the process of change
more organized and efficient.

Robin: Any lingering thoughts for our readers?

Robert: I look forward to meeting lots of new Drupal enthusiasts in Amsterdam!
  I would also like to just mention what a great job I think Kieran
Lal and Co. are doing over at CivicSpaceLabs.org. The upcoming 0.8.2
release with CiviCRM integrated is going to be a significant milestone
for Drupal, and anybody reading this who isn't familiar with
CivicSpace has waited too long, in my opinion, to head over there and
check things out.


 ---------------------------
 DRUPAL DEVELOPMENT QUICKIES
 ---------------------------

Adrian has introduced a new forms API. After Dries big call, a lot of
hands rushed to help the big transition: tobias, Dries, thehunkmonkgrup,
assimonds, killes, chx, webchick, eaton. We hope you like arrays...

Dries, Kjartan and chx refactored the node definition system. One hook to
rule them all.

killes has moved revisions to their own table. Almost ever since I joined
the project this patch was in the queue. Life will never be same now that
it's commited. More seriously, along with the previous item, if you had a
module which defined a node type it won't work now.

chx removed ?> from the end of files. You are advised to follow suit.

Steven introduced JavaScript enabled uploading.

m3avrck, nsk, Thomas et al: added a mysqli database backend.

Goba, chx, Jose, et al: reworked the URL rewrite hook so URLs can be
rewritten.

James (and Boris) consolidated all feed-related settings in one place.

Jeremy added tokens and their validation to forms. Evil spammers, die!

FYI: On October 18, I will talk about Drupal at EuroOSCON, Amsterdam.

Karoly Negyesi,
http://drupal4hu.com/

  ----------THE DRUPAL THEME GARDEN------------
     A showcase of beautiful Drupal themes.
           http://themes.drupal.org/
  ---------------------------------------------

 -----------
 DRUPAL TIPS
 -----------

GET THE NEWEST -- FAST! (Contributed by Angie Byron)
  This tip comes from kbahey: To view a list of newly released
modules, use the URL:
http://drupal.org/taxonomy/term/14
  This will show you the newest modules at the top of the list!

CHANGE ANYTHING (Contributed by Karoly Negyesi)
  All strings in Drupal can be changed. Just switch on locale module, then under
admin/locale/language/add create a language, with a custom code and
name.  Now you can manage strings under locale/string/search.
"Untranslated" (in this case: unchanged) strings fall back to English.

REMOTE AUTH (Contributed by Karoly Negyesi)
  If you want to use remote auth against your site, then create a role with
no permissions and put a user under this role. So it's
nopermissionuser at my.drupal.site.

 -----------------------------------
 FEATURED SITE: UNDERLINING EINSTEIN
 -----------------------------------

UnderliningEinstein.com is a website for a local Denver cover band. 
Users can listen to demo songs, view the set list, see upcoming show
dates, and view pictures and biography information on the band.

The site was developed by Chad Phillips (thehunmonkgroup on IRC) and
currently runs on Drupal 4.6.  The following contributed modules were
also used in the making of the site:

Event -- for a listing of the band's upcoming shows
Front Page -- this enables the sleek splash screen with the band's logo
Flexinode -- this is used to create a special node, 'Show Date' for
entering and displaying show info
Live Discussions -- to create a 'Hot Topics' section on the homepage
Contact Directory -- for keeping track of the band's venues for booking purposes
TinyMCE -- enables non-HTML savvy band members to create/edit posts in a
WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) environment
Taxonomy Access -- for protecting some restricted access areas of the site

The site is striving for a minimalist look, and the Chameleon theme
was an easy choice.  Future plans are to write a custom CSS for the
Chamelon theme, integrate a few more pictures into the site and
install an embedded flash player.

Contributed by,
Chad Phillips

 ----------------------
 CASE STUDY: HR HIGHWAY
 ----------------------

http://www.hrhighway.co.za

Originally the site was written in ASP with an Access database, which
was not efficient.  The navigation was a nightmare, and doing any
updates or work on the site was nearly impossible. The site was
looking old and all the valuable resources it had to offer were going
to waste so I started looking for a solution.

I looked into content management systems because of my limited
exposure to web scripting languages like ASP, JSP, ColdFusion and PHP.
 As a Debian GNU/Linux user I looked to open source for a solution and
found many seemingly well written projects, which, upon closer
inspection, were limited in what they could do.  Extending the
functionality of these projects was not possible for someone with
little experience.

When I first installed Drupal, the thing that struck me the most was
the ease to install it. The configuration interface was well laid out
and made sense. I did not like the categorization they used, called
taxonomy, but once you sit down and discover how it works you wonder
why anyone does it any other way.

I also found it very easy to add more functionality by installing some
of the many freely available modules.  By looking at the themes
available I could tell that I could make it look how ever I wanted it
to, without changing the functionality of the site.  With the ability
to configure the 'blocks' to show what I wanted, where and when I
wanted it to, made access to the site's resources seamless.

After playing with the site and reading through some of the well
written documentation I came across a site called drupaldocs.org and
found a whole system dedicated to the programming of Drupal along with
excellent tutorials on writing your own modules. I had very little
experience in using PHP, but understood the basics of it. After
understanding how a module works and how to access the information on
the drupaldocs.org site, I started to learn the Drupal API and found
that complicated and laborious tasks could be achieved in a line or
two of code, with extra functionality that would usually take hours to
write by hand.

The new site looks great, and the look can be changed in a few hours
using the theming system without having to rewrite the whole site
over, so getting the look up to date no longer means you have to
develop a new site. The navigation has become useable and the
resources are no longer hidden to the end user. And with the
contributed modules, my own modules, the module system and the API it
no longer takes weeks to add new functionality to the site, but a few
days or even a few hours. Administering the site and keeping the
content up to date is so easy that you no longer need a developer or
designer to do it, anyone who can work a computer and has write access
can do it themselves.

Contributed by,
Gareth Gregor

 ----------------
 DRUPAL SIGHTINGS
 ----------------

NO CONTENT.....Eeeeeeeeeeeeep!

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