Adding Understanding

The attached ebook, Files in Drupal, has been expanded and updated to account for changes in Drupal 6.
— Update, May 10th, 2008.

You'll find in the pdf document attached to this posting “10 things you ought to know” about file download in Drupal, from a developer’s perspective. This small guide provides sample code, recipes, concise yet complete explanations, tricks, and a thorough coverage of the module hook function file_download. The document is 6 11 16 17 pages long, it has been expanded and updated to account for changes in Drupal 5 and 6. I also added a 'funny' cover to the book. (My modest attempt at humour.) If you’ve downloaded the document before May 12th, 2008, PM, please redownload it. Read more →

(author unknown)

Thanks to all that attended my session for Drupalcamp Vancouver. We had a much bigger turn out that expected and ended up having to move into the big room. I've attached the slides here as well as the link to both tutorials. Both JS files are linked in the tutorials at the footer.

Accordion Tutorial:

http://www.stevekrueger.com/jquery-accordion-tutorial

"Coda" tutorial:

http://www.stevekrueger.com/jquery-accordion-tutorial/index2.html

And here are the slides:

read more

(author unknown)

Attached you'll find the latest revision of "my" IA presentation at DrupalCamp Vancouver 2008. This presentation has been evolving since DrupalConBarcelona.

read more

(author unknown)

Attached you'll find my slide deck from Your Introduction to Panels 2. This was a really fun talk to present, and the room was packed. I hope people found it useful and if you attended and have any feedback, please let me know so i can sharpen the presentation for DrupalCamp Seattle.

read more

(author unknown)

Today is my last day at Morris DigitalWorks. After a ten-year run in the newspaper industry, I am leaving to work full-time with Drupal development.

I am joining the team at Palantir, where I will be doing some programming, training and consulting for Palantir and their growing client list.

Tiffany Farriss and George DeMet have put together a great young team, and I am very excited to be coming on board. The company just moved into its new offices in order to keep up with demand for their award-winning services. Palantir is hiring more developers, too.

I also get to work with Larry Garfield, whom I greatly respect. We worked together on the GoPHP5 project, which helped chart a course for the future of Drupal.

read more

(author unknown)

Harvard Law School's faculty unanimously last week to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available online for free. The school's announcement, issued today, notes that Harvard is the first law schol to make this commitment to open access. (Harvard's Faculty...

(author unknown)

For the second year now we've won multiple Horizon Interactive Awards for websites we've developed.

Among the winning sites are Popular Science (Gold in the Magazine & News category), RedBlueAmerica (Silver in the Blog category and Bronze in the Magazine & News category), and Spectrum Magazine (Bronze in the Public Service category).

Of course, we developed all of these sites using Drupal, which itself just won repeat honors in the CNET Webware 100 Awards for best publishing platform.

(Last year, we won a Horizon Interactive Gold Award for our development of the initial BlogHer website and a Bronze for the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.)

read more

(author unknown)

Last week the Witness Hub was updated with new enhancements and features -- most obviously, the Hub Map is now also on the home page!

Here is a video demonstration:

This feature required asynchronous loading of the Hub Map, including it's full-screen switcher and chunk marker loader code and features, on-load of the 'Map' tab (a Hub-customized version of jQuery tabs).

read more

(author unknown)

Adds a CCK field type for referencing workflow states in CCK content types.

deekayen

It's been a scratchy couple of days in the tech blogging world for Drupal, as a review of David Mercer's new Drupal book veered off-topic and turned into a discussion of Drupal's appropriateness for various projects. As is to be expected in a fast-moving Slashdot discussion thread, opinions were heated and curmudgeonly grumbling was the order of the day. Today, Acquia's Jeff Whatcott notes that blogger Scott Miller is writing that Wordpress, Drupal, and other web frameworks are bad for innovation. Miller admitted readily that he'd never used Drupal, and the emphasis of his post was on people using blog and CMS frameworks to build custom applications when they should be starting from scratch. Still, for those of us who drink the Drupal Kool-Aid, it can be tough seeing these kinds of statements tossed around. How should we, the folks who build and use Drupal, approach these kinds of discussions?

read more

(author unknown)

I was recently playing around with the design of my twitter page and got it to look like Garland, the default design for Drupal. A number of you have asked me about it, so I thought I'd publish the values I'm using. So, if you want your Twitter page to also look like Garland, you can input the following values into your Twitter design.

Background Color:

EEF5FA

Background Image:

garlandtwitter.png

Text Color:

494949

Name Color:

494949

Link Color:

027AC6

Sidebar File Color:

E1F0FA

Sidebar Border Color:

E1F0FA

Of course, I'd recommend taking my website logo out of garlandtwitter.png, and putting your own image in there, but that's completely up to you.

(author unknown)

Seven years ago, I worked for an economic research firm as a public relations executive. I made excellent money, and I was good at my job. I even liked my boss. Every second I was at work, though, I wanted to shove a hot poker into my eye. When I would sit in bed at night, in those moments before sleep, the phrase “unfulfilled life” continuously looped through my mind. I still can’t tell you exactly what it was that was so awful; I was just in the wrong job, on the wrong path, and every ounce of me knew it.

Fast forward to the present. I don’t make close to what I used to, I work longer hours, and some days I’m downright awful at my job (see the comments to my Semi-Homemade Cooking post for proof). The difference is that I’m now in the right job for me, and at the end of every day I am thankful for this blessing. I get to write full time about a topic I love and interact with incredible readers and an amazing staff.

Somewhere along the way, my husband and I sat down and talked about what were the most important things in our lives. At the top of the list was our relationship. Also on the list, and in no particular order, were our family, friends, pets, food, shelter, spirituality, happiness, and being able to save money for our future children and our retirement. We agreed that we want careers, we are passionate about working, but believe that our careers should match our priorities and not the other way around.

My husband quit the job he had seven years ago and started a company. I quit the job that made me miserable and eventually started working at Unclutterer. Both of us manage staffs across the country, but telecommute from our home office. Our desks are literally seven feet away from each other. We ran the numbers, and this decision to work side-by-side results in us spending 2,200 more hours together a year. And, since our top priority is our relationship, our working arrangement is in line with that priority. Would I love it if someone wanted to give me huge bundles of cash to do my job? Of course I would. But, right now, a massive salary isn’t my top priority.

I’m glad that other people choose to live differently than we do. The world would be an incredibly boring place if we were all the same. (Additionally, I think many couples would hate it if they spent 24 hours a day together.) My point is that a person doesn’t have to remain in a job he or she hates just because the pay is good. There are always other options. Think about what you would do if you were downsized out of your current position, and follow that path. Consider a career that aligns with your life priorities. Apply for a job in a field that interests you intellectually. Or, if spending more time with your family is your priority, look for a job closer to your home so that you don’t have to make a two-hour commute every day. The change can be lateral, it doesn’t have to be for less money. But, if it is for less money, look for ways you can reduce your expenses. Only you know what changes you could make and how you would make them. Just remember that your career doesn’t have to be a punishment, and, if 40 percent of your life is spent working, it should at least reflect your life’s priorities.

**
If you have children, you may be interested in following the blog Zen Habits. Leo has six children and made a career change in much the same way I made mine. He talks about this decision on a pretty regular basis in his writing.

Also, if you need to stay in a job you hate on a temporary basis, you might want to check out the post How to Keep a Bad Job from Affecting Your Home Life that I wrote for RealSimple.com.

Speaking of careers, you also may be interested in my post today on RealSimple.com about the possessions of a long-haul semi driver. It’s titled, Simple living, trucker style.

Yesterday Garland got a long-overdue update: The page.tpl.php file was updated to use best practices. Now we can finally open up Garland in a workshop scenario and not have to use it as example of the bad practices within a .tpl.php file. This article applies to Drupal 6 and higher, though the theming principles apply to all versions of Drupal.

What's this about best practices? Let's compare the before and after of a few of the improvements. Each of the items below are extremely common things you can do to keep your .tpl.php files clean.

read more

(author unknown)

I was inspired by this episode of SEOMoz's whiteboard friday where Rand talks about tracking non-traditional conversions (like when someone posts a comment on your blog) so I decided to check out how easy this was to do in Drupal.

read more

(author unknown)

When Drupal does a content search, it optionally weighs the results using up to four scoring factors. These scoring factors include keyword relevancy, recency of the content, number of comments, and (if statistics module is enabled), the number of page views. Site administrators can adjust the relative weighting of these scoring factors from the example.com/admin/settings/search administration page. Setting any scoring factor to zero disables it.

In this article, which applies primarily to Drupal 6 but is relevant for Drupal 5 as well, I explore how useful these scoring factors really are, and whether they help Drupal search live up to the high standards that are set by leaders like Google and Yahoo!. This article is part of a series of search related articles in preparation for the Minnesota Search Sprint.

read more

(author unknown)

I thought I'd update everyone on the progress of the second edition of Pro Drupal Development.

The second edition will cover Drupal 6, and is expanded to cover new core topics like actions, triggers, AHAH, etc.

read more

(author unknown)

Yesterday I made this screencast to demonstrate three awesome new themes for Drupal 6. Of course I was excited to share it with people, so today I embarked to do something I had not yet done: upload video to the Internet. Yeah, I know, everyone is doing it, am I behind the moon or something? Not anymore. In fact, my inaugural "first time" provided a great opportunity to test as many video sharing sites as I could find. The best is Blip.tv. Aside from the great quality I especially liked how I could customize the embed code to fit any size I wanted. Here is the video, served by Blip.tv, and below are links to all the other copies, 13 in total (assuming Revver gets their act together and actually publishes it), so you can compare the quality on each of them.

read more

(author unknown)

Enables users to create Mailman lists from within Drupal. The module is capable of creating and deleting lists, as well as allowing users to modify the description within Drupal.

It uses XML-RPC to communicate with the Mailman, which can be installed on a separate machine. XML-RPC functionality requires a patch to Mailman, which is included in this module.

kaerast

MotoGP is the world’s premier motorcycling championship, with a season of 18 Grands Prix in 14 countries bringing together the world’s top motorcycle manufacturers such as Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, Ducati, Kawasaki, Aprilia and KTM - plus an elite crop of riders from every corner of the globe. Their website just relaunched on Drupal: see http://www.motogp.com. Rumor has it that on racing days, they serve up to 2 million pages a day. Yowza!(author unknown)

I have been quiet recently. (There are good reasons for that which I will not bore people with.)

But we are about ready to make some noise in the Drupal community by opening the Knight Drupal Initiative to proposals.

For those of you who were not at DrupalCON Boston, here is the short summary of where we are:

• Knight Foundation came to us with an idea for funding Drupal-related projects.
• After some great community meetings, we came up with an open proposal process for applying for grant money.
• There will be an ongoing process of applying for Knight Drupal Initiative grants.
• The Drupal community will filter and recommend proposals. Knight Foundation will provide funding and management for accepted applications.

As I said, we are just about ready to announce the program as ready for proposals. But first we have a few tasks to clean up.

If you have a few minutes, please look over the task list and pitch in. We especially need some :

read more

(author unknown)