English

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.

read more

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.

read more

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.

read more

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.

read more

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

read more

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.

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.

read more

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.

read more

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.

read more

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.

read more

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

read more

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?

read more

The last day to submit sessions proposals for DrupalCon DC will be December 10th, so if you'd like to present but haven't yet submitted your idea, please submit your session in the next three weeks.

There's been an amazing turnout for sessions proposals - 98 sessions have been submitted so far and touch on a great variety of topics. In the weeks after the deadline, we'll work with a volunteer committee (more on the to come) to go through the proposals - and in conjunction with the votes each has received - select the best sessions for each track, merge ones that overlap, and ensure that each track has good depth and representation.

In January, we'll post the final schedule online. We know many of you need to show your boss an official schedule before registering and many are anxious to see a final schedule so you can plan ahead and make sure you get the most out of DrupalCon, so we'll get the final schedule posted well before DrupalCon. If you have a last minute session idea, we have plenty of space for BoF sessions which will be scheduled on the fly.

read more

At the risk of starting the vim vs. emacs sort of flame war I'm curious what folks think about Komodo IDE vs. Coda for general use. I've been using Komodo for about a year and liking it but faced with two pretty equal prices for upgrading vs moving to Coda I'm starting to look at how I really use Komodo.

read more

The November DC Drupal Meetup will take place tonight at 7:00 pm at Stetson’s. So far two people have volunteered to give a five minute lightening presentation. Jeff will talk about the new module Nice Map, which allows you to make good looking maps like you can see here. Ian will discuss the strategies we’ve implemented to more efficiently build websites. Anyone is welcome and everyone is encouraged to give a lightening presentation. If you’d like to present, please post your topic here and come ready to talk tonight.

DC Drupal meetups are for all levels of Drupal developers and users, so don’t be shy if you’re a newbie. These meetups are great opportunities to learn more about Drupal and what you can do with it, meet developers working with the platform, and meet users to hear about their experiences working with Drupal. You can find more details about the meetup in the Washington, DC Drupal group. Hope to see you tonight!

read more

Angela Byron is one of the lead developers and a community manager for the open source content management system Drupal, which OStatic is based on (along with sites such as The Onion and Fast Company). Few people have more influence on and knowledge of Drupal than she does, including working directly with Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal. We caught up with Angie and she weighed in on the future for Drupal, and what the open source movement needs.