[documentation] [Drupal newsletter] Drupal Newsletter for Winter,
2005/06 -- DRAFT 1
Drupal.org newsletter
info at drupal.org
Thu Jan 12 02:07:27 UTC 2006
------------DRUPAL NEWSLETTER FOR WINTER, 2005/06 -- DRAFT 1------------
Please comment on this draft and fill in the gaps.
I'm afriad I have less time to work on generating content, and I thank Steve
Dondley for his work on this.
Robin
-----------------------------------------------------------
Editor's overall comment: Newsletter seems really geared to developers. Is
that desired?
(We can only publish what we get, more user content submitted, more gets
published. Feel free to submit some. --Robin)
Not yet written...
Module review: Views
*In this issue...*
* Upcoming Events – Learn about upcoming Drupal-lover events.
* Drupal Interview – This month's interview with Drupal contributor, Angie
Byron.
* Summer of Code Projects – Google's "Summer of Code" heats up Drupal
development.
* Module Spotlight - A look at "Views," a powerful new third-party module.
* Drupal Development Quickies – What have the developers been working on
lately?
* Drupal Tips – Tricks to help you harness the full potential of Drupal.
* Status Update - In writing, please hand in.
------------UPCOMING EVENTS------------
OPEN SOURCE CMS SUMMIT
All Drupal developers should plan to make their way to the west coast of Canada
for the event to kick off your year: the Open Source CMS Summit and DrupalCon,
[http://drupal.org/conference-vancouver-2006] February 7th thru 9th. As the
event page says, this will be a developer-centric event focused on
collaborating together on future directions and everyone's favourite topic --
APIs!
With it being peak ski season, developers will get a chance to enjoy British
Columbia's coastal mountains, including the famous Whistler, for some of the
best slopes in the world. For those who don't ski, there will be plenty of
beer going round at the lodge!
Chad Phillips and Angie Byron are the two main Drupal organizers, with Boris
Mann and Roland Tanglao doing the Vancouver local organizing and helping with
the summit as a whole. Please join the Drupal conference mailing list
[http://drupal.org/mailing-lists] and/or check out the wiki
[http://2006.northernvoice.ca/wiki/open-source-cms-and-blogging-tools-summit]
to add your own ideas to make this a great gathering of Drupalites. Oh, and of
course, flip the switch in your user profile to get listed on the attendees
page [http://drupal.org/profile/conference-vancouver-2006].
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------------DRUPAL INTERVIEW------------
For this issue of the Drupal newsletter, Robin Monks interviews Angie Bryon,
(a.k.a. "webchick."). Angie came to our community at the end of June 2005
through Google's Summer of Code [http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html]
program designed to help bring new talent and support to important open source
projects. Angie's current focus is improving documentation and generally
helping out wherever she can with graphics work, user support, module
extensions, and the countless other tasks that go into the Drupal open source
project. Read on to learn more about Angie's self-styled "Winter of Code"
program and what motivates her to stay involved.
*So, how did you originally find Drupal?*
Back a year or so ago, I came across the SpreadFirefox.com website, and was
involved there for a little while making some posters. Their site was clean and
easy to use, so I did some "homework" and determined that it was running
CivicSpace, which is based off of Drupal. That's how I initially heard of the
project. Then it kind of moved back under my radar again until Summer of Code.
When I saw Drupal on the list of projects, I immediately wanted to get involved
with something that was allowing a grassroots activism movement to work so well.
And now I've had the opportunity to actually dig into Drupal's "guts" a bit. :)
*So how did that opportunity actually come about?*
One of my instructors from my college found out about the opportunity and
e-mailed myself and a few other students from my class. Getting involved in an
open source development project is something that's been on my "life goals"
list for quite a few years, so when I saw the opportunity, I jumped on it. I
was especially excited about helping with Drupal, both because a) it was being
used as a tool in activism, so I feel like a contribution there is helping make
the world a better place (very important to me), and b) the particular project I
took on (quiz module) was to help further Drupal's ability to be used within
education, another extremely important issue to me.
*I understand you did some work on the forms API, would you care to comment on
that?*
While I've not done work with the Forms API directly (Adrian is the guru there
who allowed it to come to be), I have been trying to do a lot of work in making
the transition between 4.6 and 4.7 as easy for developers as possible, and a big
part of that is the effort being put into the documentation for the new forms
API.
*What kind of documentation improvements have you been working on?*
The first effort has been to try and centralize a "resource center" for
developers to go to to learn everything they need to know to convert their
modules to the new API. You can find the result of that here:
http://drupal.org/node/33338. This area will include everything from
step-by-step documentation to answers to frequently asked questions, to tips
that have been submitted by other developers to aid people in their form
conversions.
The second area is the Forms API reference, available here:
http://drupaldocs.org/api/head/file/contributions/docs/developer/topics/forms_api_reference.html
which is a comprehensive listing of *all* form elements and attributes, along
with descriptions about what they do, where they can/should be used, and "real
world" examples from Drupal core on how they're used.
The final piece of this will be a complete step-by-step run-through of how the
Project module was converted (this module is particularly good for this because
there is just about *everything* a module developer will run into), as well as
documentation of the new hooks provided by the Forms API and that sort of
thing. I'm working closely with Chad (hunmonk) on these, and Kieran of
CivicSpaceLabs has a huge hand in helping fund their development.
*Great! So what do you do when not working on Drupal?*
Sleeping and eating. Every other waking moment is taken up by Drupal. ;) No,
actually, I also do volunteer work with a few other online communities. One of
these is CyberArmy.net, which is a community of primarily young people
interested in open source, privacy, computer security/"hacking" and so forth
and we try and hook them up with constructive opportunities to help out the
Internet as a whole. I also enjoy playing video games, drawing/sketching, and
doing logic puzzles and the like (yes, I'm a big nerd ;)).
*Any final comments for our readers?*
Only that I'd like to sincerely thank everyone in the Drupal community for
really welcoming me here and making me feel like "one of the guys." I didn't
have a lot of confidence initially when I first started with this project,
since I was just kind of some mostly self-taught random girl coming from a
community college. But everyone has been so supportive and encouraging to me,
receptive to my input a nd feedback, and constantly throwing new opportunities
my way. I've met so many friends and learned so many things since first coming
here, that this experience has been literally life-changing. Thank you!
------------VIEWS MODULE EXTEND'S DRUPAL FLEXIBILITY------------
Anybody who's spent any time cruising Drupal's forums knows that one of the
most commonly asked questions is something along the lines of "How do I display
a list of nodes of a certain type on a page sorted by author and then by date?"
The answer used to be "dust off your favorite PHP and MySQL reference works and
get cracking."
But a new module, developed by Earl Miles (a.k.a. merlinofchaos), promises to
make customized displays of content much more attainable for the average user
and save bundles of time for even the most experienced Drupal developer. It's
called "views" and can be downloaded from http://drupal.org/node/38878.
The views module is feature packed, providing a whole host of options that
allow site administrators to pull content from the database and display it in
just about every conceivably useful way, all without knowing one line of PHP.
Want your content paged so only 5 entries show up on a page at a time? No
problem. Sorted by one, two, or more fields? Of course! Listed in a table?
Yup, can do that, too. How about output to a block? Easy as pie. Can you
filter output based on arguments supplied by the url? Yes, sir!
And amazingly, all of this flexibility, and much more, is provided by simply
selecting options on one single web-based form. And, yes, the web form can be
a little intimidating, especially for newer Drupal users. But no worry here
either. Views has an export/import feature that lets you share views with
other users. If the views module takes off, and I think it will, there will
soon be an entire library of views at the Drupal site which can be imported in
a matter of seconds with a cut, a paste, and a click.
If all that doesn't impress you, Earl has also thrown in some additional
features to win over the hearts and minds of Drupal developers and designers.
For example, views has its own API so that other modules can let views do the
work of displaying output. This will save developers time when creating
sophisticated modules needing to output data in many different ways. And views
can even be themed so that designers can give them their own distinctive look.
Just as the flexinode module created flexible ways for administrators to input
data into nodes, views promises to do the same for node output. There's little
doubt in my mind views will become a staple of many Drupal installations. The
module is still in beta and needs testers to find any bugs and help improve
usability. If interested, just download the module at
http://drupal.org/node/38878 and report your findings at
http://drupal.org/project/issues/views. Be one of the first to check it out
this amazing piece of code!
------------DRUPAL DEVELOPMENT QUICKIES------------
* DriesK separated introduced 'administer access control' permission which is
now separate from 'administer users'. (Patch #32669
[http://drupal.org/node/32669])
* kbahey added 'site offline/maintenance' feature. (Patch #32622
[http://drupal.org/node/32622])
* Countless bugfixes against form API. Most of them by asimmonds, chx and
hunmnonk.
* Steven made huge improvements to Drupal's search feature. Indexing has
been made smarter and more robust and several advanced search operators (e.g.
phrase, node type, ...) have been added. The result rankings are now
customizable. (Patch #28159 [http://drupal.org/node/28159])
* Steven introduced a user-friendly error screen for users with unsupported
database software.
* Stefan increased a designer's ability to theme Drupal. Chief among these
improvements is the ability to theme poll results.
* ax made blogapi autodiscovery (rsd) work with the Flock browser (and any
other standards-chasing RSD using client). This lets you post to your blog
without even visiting your site. (Patch #34749 [http://drupal.org/node/34749])
* m3avrck and deekayen cured an immense number of PHP5 warnings. (Patch
#30930 [http://drupal.org/node/30930])
* the documentation team, Kieran and webchick introduced much improved admin
help in core modules. This is the "mega patch" season... (Patch #26139
[http://drupal.org/node/26139])
* Richard Archer integrated primary links into the menu system. This was much
needed. (Patch #22215 [http://drupal.org/node/22215])
* Morbus improved handling of temporary files/directory. (Patch #26249
[http://drupal.org/node/26249])
* Cvbge did an awesome job to make pgsql and Drupal work better together. Too
many patches to list.
* Robert added permission to enable/disbale theme switching by users. (Patch
#38981 [http://drupal.org/node/38981])
* saerdna et al. added a 'change own username' permission. (Patch #39547
[http://drupal.org/node/39547])
* One of those rare moments when two maintainers work on one patch: JonBob
and Richard separated callback handling from menu handling. (Patch #35768
[http://drupal.org/node/35768])
* Morbus optimized performance of URL aliasing for newly installed sites.
(Patch #29326 [http://drupal.org/node/29326])
* drumm introduced the first piece of an install: an SQL updater you can hook
into. (Patch #35924 [http://drupal.org/node/35924])
* Though we rarely mention fixes here, big kudos to Morbus, webchick and
tangent for fixing the order of node(api) form fields. (Patch #34920
[http://drupal.org/node/34920])
* chx broke the record of 'added code' per 'comment needed for the code'
ratio with #40886 [http://drupal.org/node/40886]. Reference counting is tricky.
Thanks goes to Goba.
* Richard and chx made it possible to link to the front page. (Patch #36465
[http://drupal.org/node/36465])
* Steven introduced some javascript to make textareas in forms resizeable
(Patch #42446 [http://drupal.org/node/42446])
* Richard and Steven made it possible to use external URLs in menus (and made
url() more flexible). Extra Druplipoints to them for this. (Patch #32785
[http://drupal.org/node/32785])
Karoly Negyesi,
http://drupal4hu.com/
-------------SECURITY UPDATES-------------
Get the latest security updates
right in your inbox! Subscribe to the
Security Announcements mailing list today!
http://drupal.org/security
------------------------------------------
------------DRUPAL TIPS------------
Editor: Should put in a couple more tips. And ones that are of interest to
admins, not just developers (unless we want just developer tips).
*Track activity and changes on your favorite projects with RSS* (Contributed by
Bèr Kessels)
The CVS log is often underrated as a means of tracking what happens to
your favorite project.
Let us take as an example the project named "shazamgallery": Visit the link
http://drupal.org/cvs?file=/modules/shazamgallery/ to see the latest commits to
that project. The /modules/shazamgallery/ in the url can be replaced by
anyhting of your interest. You can even track changes to one file. For
example, http://drupal.org/cvs?file=/modules/shazamgallery/shazamgallery.mysql
lets you track changes to the database file only.
The most interesting part, however, is the RSS feed that comes with that
at http://drupal.org/cvs?rss=true&file=/modules/shazamgallery/
Use this to track your own contribs (to see if some other contributor
slips in features, or bugs, by accident). Or to track changes of the
projects you use on your drupal site.
------------USER GEARED CONTENT. PLEASE WRITE, VOLUNTEERS?------------
Talk about how artists on a tight budget can build powerful web sites to help
them spread the word about their art. Do they have podcasts/sample work.
Might be interesting to mention.
------------COMING UP IN DRUPAL 4.7------------
Editor's note: Seems like we're missing some other major changes like
forms.api. Specifically, what's the big deal about forms api?
(doc team, thoughts? --Robin)
One of the most obvious changes involves the Menu module. No longer will the
primary and secondary links be a custom template configuration issue. The
control of these links has been moved into the menu module. After turning on
menu module, you can go into *administer >> settings >> menu*
?q=admin/settings/menu You will find a new option Primary links settings. If
you do not have separate menu's yet, you will need to create them and then
designate them here. This will involve some minor code changes to any custom
templates you have and you can see examples in the included Blue Marine theme.
You will also have the option to add items directly to the menu when you first
create them.
In the aggregator module, the 'Allowed HTML tags' control has been exposed
through the GUI so that you can edit for what html tags you will allow for in
the rss feeds you pull from other sites. As an example, by default the tag is
not allowed, but now you can change this through the *administer >> settings >>
aggregator* settings instead of in the code itself.
The configuration for your node type workflow (published, promoted to front
page, etc) has been moved from it's semi-obscure location in content >>
configure to a more sensible and consistent *administer >> settings >> content
types*. This will help new neophytes and experienced admins all around.
Some new settings have been added to the user module in access control
*administer >> access control*. Added permissions are 'administer access
control' and 'change own user name'.
While it is exciting that blocks are now able to go into a number of different
regions (left/right sidebar, header, content, footer) now, that is nothing
compared to additional controls added to block configuration settings. You now
have an experts mode option to control visibility based on php code added to the
block configuration
as well as some radio button options to control site wide user visibility
settings.
The help files have had a serious going over and many now include links back to
the Drupal.org site so that you can take advantage of new and updated
information from links right in your own installation.
Contributed by,
Steven Peck
/For more information about Drupal, visit our website at http://drupal.org/.
Content donations can be sent to the editor using the form at
http://drupal.org/contact .
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license,
visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/. /
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