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Over the last week or two I've spent a lot of time on an aspect of my Quick Tabs module that I am certain none of its users will care a hoot about. It wasn't a case of adding a new feature or fixing a bug or even improving usability, but a question of, to put it succinctly, cutting down on its evilness. The admin form for creating and editing Quick Tabs blocks (where you choose either a block or a view for each tab) had a serious amount of ahah functionality: click a button to instantly add a new tab, click a button to instantly remove one of your tabs, select a view for your tab and have the view display drop-down be instantly populated with the correct options for that view. It was pretty user-friendly; there was just one problem: it flew in the face of Form API best practices.

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One of the toughest aspects of transitioning an existing site to Drupal can be content migration. While there's an entire category of modules available for import/export tasks, sometimes you just need to bite the bullet and parse some HTML.

One of the tools I like to use for this is the PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser. This allows you to use the Document Object Model (DOM). For our purposes, all this means is that the document is modeled as a tree – each element, such as a <div> or a <p>, has parents, children, and siblings, and you can search for them. (I'm sure to many readers this is already familiar, especially if you are using jQuery). Compared to an event-driven parser, I find that using the DOM results in smaller code that's easier to write.

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Open source software applications are becoming an increasingly viable alternative to vendor provided commercial software. Jeff Walpole explores the differences between these types of software, and the pros and cons of each alternative in a full article written for Idealware , a 501c3 nonprofit that provides candid Consumer-Reports-style reviews and articles about software of interest to nonprofits.

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If you’ve been following along you’d be aware that one of the nuts we’re currently trying to crack is the modules section of the drupal.org website - how can we make modules more findable?

In the interest of gathering more information to help make a good decision, i’ve put together another little cardsorting exercise. If you have a spare 15mins or so, I’d love if you could take a look at it!

You can find it here: http://disambiguity.optimalsort.com/drupalmodules/

If you have any comments/questions/feedback to the contents of the cardsort or the process, feel free to post them here.

The cardsort is set to close on Friday 21 November.

Thank you!

I checked out the new voice-activated Google Mobile App for iPhone this morning. It works pretty well - not perfect - but solid.

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I checked out the new voice-activated Google Mobile App for iPhone this morning. It works pretty well - not perfect - but solid.

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Je regarde toujours avec intérêt l'actualité de eZ System, l'éditeur du très bon CMS eZ Publish. En effet, ce CMS est assez proche de Drupal et, depuis l'arrivée d'Acquia, les deux éco-systèmes sont encore plus proches. Alors il est toujours intéressant de suivre la stratégie de l'éditeur et de tracer un parallèle avec Drupal.

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Versions has finally made it out of beta. It's a very intuitive GUI for managing subversion repositories and working copies. We've been using this application for a long while now, and found it to be user friendly and suitable for designers and developers alike. Recommended!

Jay just announced Acquia's plans to get into the hosted search business. By doing so, we hope to provide Drupal sites a (i) faster, (ii) more scalable search solution that (iii) can work across multiple sites, that (iv) can handle broader content, (v) that offers faceted navigation and more.

Content management systems with basic keyword search are going nowhere but out of style. Content management systems that do search really well can improve a site's navigation in new and significant ways. We want Drupal sites to be in the latter category.

As we've learned with big sites like drupal.org, it is extremely difficult to do search well from within Drupal, hence the need for a powerful hosted search service. By offering a hosted search service, Acquia continues to tear down barriers for adoption so Drupal can fulfill its full potential.

We're still working on this new service, and we don't know yet when it will be ready, but let us know if you're interested in being an early private beta tester.

Je fais des billets sur les bugs, sur les problèmes de performances, d'installation, de mise à jour, les incompatibilités, bref sur tout ça, tout ça... Il ne faudrait juste pas oublier d'en faire aussi lorsque tout marche si bien qu'il n'y aurait juste rien à dire... Et depuis maintenant 8 ans que j'utilise Mandriva (avec Mandrake 7.1), c'est la première fois que j'en ai aussi peu à raconter... Alors je fête cela en en faisant une tartine

Cas d'école n°1, transformer une Mandriva 2008.1 Desktop en 2009.0

• suppression des anciens médias par urpmi.remove -a.
• ajout des nouveaux médias en passant par l'excellent zarb.org
• lancement de la procédure urpmi --auto-select.

1h plus tard... transformation achevée sans problèmes, un redémarrage étonnant de rapidité couronné par une Mandriva toute neuve avec conservation de tous les paramétrages.

Cas d'école n°2, transformer une Mandriva desktop 2009.0 32bits en 64bits.

• Récupération des médias x86_64 (sans les installer) par zarb.org que l'on copie précieusement sur une partition de sauvegarde.
• Sauvegarde du /etc sur cette même partition.
• Récupération d'une ISO CD-ROM free dual-arch.
• Démarrage sur le CD, procédure d'installation (devenue très classieuse), formatage de la partition "racine" (et aucune autre) et c'est parti...
• 7 minutes plus tard, la machine est redémarrée en 64bits, mode texte de base.
• Suppression des médias du CD-RM puis ajout de ceux que l'on a sauvegardé plus haut.
• installation de gnome via urpmi gnome-task, openoffice.org64, etc.
• 15 minutes plus tard, démarrage de GDM.

Là encore, rien à dire, ça marche nickel. Le bureau est simplement le même qu'avant en plus véloce. Juste une étrangeté pour qui installe son pilote nVidia à la main, la version 64bits "brouille" l'écran de la console (c'est juste un problème d'affichage ANSI). Pour récupérer cela, un Ctrl-I suffit (merci à freeflyer pour l'info).

Le seul bug que j'ai trouvé pour l'instant sur cette Mandriva 64 bits concerne l'urpmi --auto-orphans. Le fait d'avoir viré mono, implique de virer gnome-task, implique pour urpmi que tous les paquets gnomes sont orphelins, bénin mais quelque peu excessif

Cas d'école n°3, transformer une Mandriva serveur 2007.0 en 2009.0

• suppression des anciens médias et ajout des nouveaux (zarb.org).
• Lancement d'un petit urpmi --auto-select.

15 minutes plus tard (avec un débit sur proxad de 11mo/s ça aide ), transformation achevée. Redémarrage de la machine, tous les services fonctionnent http, imap, smtp, spamd, etc. Et tant mieux sinon vous le liriez pas ce billet

Conclusion

Bref, je ne sais pas ce qu'ils ont mis dans cette Mandriva là, mais quel plaisir !!

Acquia innove et va proposer un service de recherche pour vos sites qui me semble particulièrement intéressant.

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At Mollom, we're focused on blocking spam. To do that, we've built a world-class (and world-wide) infrastructure that evaluates your site's comments and posts in real time, freeing you from moderation duties to spend your time on more satisfying pursuits.

Mollom is built on the freemium business model, and our customers have a variety of different needs. While many of our clients take advantage of our free filtering service to protect their site, a growing number use our Mollom Plus subscription service. We're always looking for new ways to add value for all of our customers, especially those with Mollom Plus subscriptions.

To that end, we're pleased to announce our new 99.9% availability standard for the back-end network available to our Mollom Plus subscribers. With 99.9% availability, we guarantee to keep our infrastructure working on your behalf. Those guarantees are in writing at http://mollom.com/standard-service-level-agreement and part of the updated web service agreement for paid subscriptions.

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The search technology area is highly important to people with websites. As a result, I've spent serious time looking at it. Several things have come from this time spent:

• The important thing: We'll soon be adding "hosted site search" capabilities to the Acquia Network for our subscribers. More about this below.

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Last weekend I blogged about openQRM 4.2 being released.

This morning Matt finally let me know the long waiting fresh and new Drupal based openQRM.com is live !

Feed Added!

Beyonce's official website is now using Drupal. Oh oh oh!

FFmpeg wrapper just got a nice little utility for testing FFmpeg conversion settings. For most people the knowledge of video and audio codecs is a bit of an arcane science- what settings go with what codec, much less the rules about audio formats... it is all a bit messy.

So I've put together the beginnings of an interface that lets an admin select a file uploaded to the server and run tests to their hearts content on it. Bitrates, codecs, and all the other options that FFmpeg Wrapper provides are available for use.

Perhaps the most important aspect, however, is the debugging data that the FFmpeg provides when the conversion fails. If you are converting a 48khz wmv file to flv and wondering why the conversion keeps failing, this will help you see that you need to set the audio bit rate to 44.1khz.

The interface is not perfect, and certainly the ability to pass the testing function a file path as an argument would be very helpful (especially off the Drupal attached files list), but these are all things to come.

Code is CVS DRUPAL-5 branch, will get ported up to 6x sometime soon.

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The stereotype of an author, solitary and banging away at their typewriter, is only a little bit different in the digital age. Although the typewriter has been swapped out for a keyboard and a monitor, the solitary nature of writing for print is still true. Your work is your own and you are responsible for it. Editors give feedback and sometimes they are right and you are wrong, and sometimes they are right and your ego doesn't care. Sulking is (often) inevitable.

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So far we have gathered our resources, blocked out the site, set up content types, and created some simple views to display that content. In this post, we'll look at:

• Targetting a landing page
• Basics of setting up a Google ad
• Basic user permissions
• Terms and Conditions

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If you sit down with another member of the Drupal community in a cafe to hash out something, then you are with... a friend (hardly, you might barely know each other)? a colleague (doesnt that mean that we are working at the same place)? associate? I am afraid that an open source community being such a new thing it needs a new word. Fellow Drupaler -- sure, try to say that to the average Joe and watch the glassy eyes :) And how do you explain to the average border guard that you are traveling to a code sprint...? A GSoC mentor summit?

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