Planet Drupal

Lesson Two of my special Getting Started With Drupal series of instructional videos.

This video explores the basic configuration options to consider once you have successfully installed Drupal.

New releases of the FAQ module have been made - versions 5.x-2.12 and 6.x-1.8. This release includes a number of new features, including the ability to have multiple FAQ layouts and both short and long FAQ question texts. However the majority of the changes were small bug fixes.

The new features added include:

• #251493 - Ability to have both short and long questions.
• #299191 - Ability to have multiple FAQ layouts.
• #281827 -"An edit answer" link provided on faq page under the answer.
• #272265 - Pathauto support.
• #304210 - Configurable re-writing of faq taxonomy term links.
• #300959 - added support for multi-lingual taxonomy terms.

The new releases can be downloaded from the FAQ project page, while details on the changes can be found below:

• FAQ 5.x-2.12
• FAQ 6.x-1.8

Enjoy!

Eclipse, with the newly released PDT 2.0, is a very capable Drupal IDE. With code completion, automatic documentation lookups, and integrated debugging, Eclipse is very good for anyone who spends time doing Drupal code.

One issue I've run into with Eclipse when working on contributed modules is that the modules themselves aren't located within a Drupal installation. I found myself resorting to external programs or the command line to copy my changes to my development site or to my local development copy. Using Eclipse's External Tools, it's possible to deploy changes with a single click, greatly reducing the time to test modified code.

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traffic to a website can be divided into four major sources : direct, paid, organic and referrals. unsurprisingly, google analytics segments the traffic sources reports accordingly.

there is, however, a small catch. the ever growing popularity of search engines has led to an odd use case : users who use a search engine to search for exactly your domain name, instead of simply typing www.mydomain.com into their web browser. these users have just reached your site via an "organic search" and google analytics will classify them accordingly.

technically this is correct, but semantically it's troubling. the users who have reached your site by typing "mydomain" into Google have far more in common with the users that entered www.mydomain.com into their URL bar and far less in common with those users that reached your site by typing "my optimized search term" into Google. and the population of these users is not small - on one of the commercial drupal sites that i maintain these "mydomain" Google searchers account for over one third of the supposedly organic traffic.

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At last, I'm happy to announce the Code Sorcery Workshop support forums! These forums will gradually become the official support channel for our Mac products Meerkat and Pukka, as well as a place to discuss what's on your mind with regard to our website, potential future products, our services, or happenings in the Mac & Drupal communities.

The forums have been open for a week or two in unannounced form, but have quite expectedly not garnered much activity, so consider this the official "word". Feel free to go to it!

Feature Run-Down

We are using Drupal for the forum solution, which is what is used for the rest of the website as well. I'd like to take a moment to go over some of the features that this provides. In the near future, I also hope to make another post about the more technical details, such as which modules were used, what kind of custom solutions were implemented, and what administrative features are provided on the backend.

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The most exciting move in Acquia for me so far just happened a few days ago. We rolled out what was called "Big tent" internally, and means much wider support for all Drupal 6 sites. As Dries points out in his blog post, we used to support our Acquia Drupal distribution via forums, tickets and phone support. However, we found that virtually all sites will use other modules, custom code and themes, tweaks to existing code. This was not surprising, but took some time to figure out how we could handle in our support organization.

While there are multiple exciting sides of this story, the one I am about to tell is about the openness of our approach to this move. The story on "making the Acquia Network Connector modules available separate to Acquia Drupal" quickly morphed into publishing them on drupal.org, since that made most sense.

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Drupal service provider joins leading vendors to advance the reach of open source computing

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Last year, Acquia opened for business, offering commercial support for a defined software distribution called Acquia Drupal. One could purchase commercial support for all the modules in Acquia Drupal. As I mentioned last week in my 2009 predictions for Drupal, one of the things we learned relatively fast is that people wanted more than just Acquia Drupal. They wanted support for all modules, themes and custom code.

No surprise, but when we set out to build Acquia little more than a year ago, we weren't quite sure how we'd go about supporting everything with the limited resources we had available. We have since learned and grew a lot, and we decided that we're finally ready to start providing technical support for all of Drupal 6.x -- not just Acquia Drupal but all modules and themes available on drupal.org, as well as custom code.

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Drupal for Education and E-learning is a must-have for any teacher, school or education institution considering a new school website, or technology-centric project in the classroom. Whether the reader has heard of Drupal or not, the book provides valuable insights, empowering ideas and simple instructions to help get any teacher or school on their way to having a powerful, useful and valuable learning resource.

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Many Drupal developers use Subversion (SVN) internally within their organization, due to its many benefits over what the Drupal project's repository uses: the dated CVS. One annoying aspect though is that almost all Drupal files use CVS style tags, such as the $Id$ one. Subversion does not recognize these by default.

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During the past couple years I've had some brief but rewarding content management discussions with Deane Barker from Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive.  Dean has worked with quite a few Web content management systems over the years and appears to be most passionate to using eZ Publish.  Naturally, our discussions almost always involve Dean talking about ez Publish and me talking about Drupal.  Unfortunately, as I am more of a system administrator than a developer, the information I have been able to provide him about Drupal has always been limited.

Well, it looks as if Deane Barker has finally decided to get on the Drupal learning curve and find out more about this great CMS.

I’m working with Drupal for the first time on a hobby project I’m doing with Seth Gottlieb (about which you’ll hear much more later…). Adam Kalsey — Drupal ninja that he is — is advising us on the technical implementation, and he’s been a great help.

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We had a need from a client where they wanted to check certain complex conditions from a relatively big decision matrix. Without going into specifics, they wanted to check a progressive set of rules for users and taking certain actions when all the conditions were met. Checking one or two conditions is not a problem on a modern day web site, but because the rules are progressive and have to be all checked from the start every time, that involves a lot of processing, a lot of database queries and basically a lot of time.

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In just one short month FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting, is coming to Brussels again. Just like last year Drupal has its own Developers Room. The Drupal track is far from filled though so we're still looking for talk proposals and requests. The final date for presentation proposal is Friday January 9 so be fast!

You can keep up to date with Drupal Digest's FOSDEM feed.

Some comments I received for my post about coming to terms with Drupal requested a list of Modules that I trust. I considered several approaches, including starting a database of modules with my reviews. I decided against that--I would hate to sound authoritative on which Drupal modules are good and which are bad because I haven't used so many of them, so I'm just going to discuss my experience with some common modules and hope that it helps. This is absolutely just my subjective opinion having run these modules for over a year on Observer.com and Politicker.com. I will vouch for these modules to the extent they will only ruin your life if you use them badly. Of course, your mileage may vary wildly, and if you're running or starting a site of any scale, please don't just take my word for it.

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Some comments I received for my post about coming to terms with Drupal requested a list of Modules that I trust. I considered several approaches, including starting a database of modules with my reviews. I decided against that--I would hate to sound authoritative on which Drupal modules are good and which are bad because I haven't used so many of them, so I'm just going to discuss my experience with some common modules and hope that it helps. This is absolutely just my subjective opinion having run these modules for over a year on Observer.com and Politicker.com. I will vouch for these modules to the extent they will only ruin your life if you use them badly. Of course, your mileage may vary wildly, and if you're running or starting a site of any scale, please don't just take my word for it.

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Every time I have to do a presentation on Drupal, I have to go on the hunt for a list of Drupal Powered websites. So, rather than looking each time, I am compiling a list here. I am kicking off the list with most of those listed on Dries website. I have excluded some from Dries list as they are not US based sites, which is my audience.

DivX Labs
Oxfam International
French Ministry for Health, Youth and Sport
ASI - European Space Agency
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Pearl Jam

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